Life's Values

Abstract

Abstract This book seeks to explain what is of ultimate value in individual lives. Proposed candidates include pleasure, happiness, meaning, and well-being. Only the last is the all-inclusive category of personal value, and it consists in the satisfaction of deep rational desires. Since individuals’ rational desires differ, the book cannot tell you what will maximize your own well-being, what in particular you ought to pursue, although it can tell you to make your desires rational, that is, informed and coherent. It can also explain the nature of the states that typically enter into well-being: pleasure, happiness, and meaning being typically partial causes as well as effects of well-being. All are byproducts of satisfying rational desires and rarely successfully aimed at directly. Pleasure comes in sensory, intentional, and pure feeling forms, each with an opposite in pain or distress. Happiness in its primary sense is an emotion, not a constant state as some philosophers assume, and in secondary senses a mood (disposition to have an emotion) or temperament (disposition to be in a mood). Meaning in life is a matter of events in one’s life fitting into intelligible narratives. Events in narratives are understood teleologically as well as causally, in terms of outcomes aimed at as well as antecedent events. In briefest terms, this book distinguishes and relates pleasure, happiness, well-being, and meaning, and relates each to motivation and value.