Does the fact that what is good for me depends upon what I care about decisively favour one theory of well-being over its rivals? (2025 Q15)

No, the fact what is good for me depends on what I care about does not decisively favour any particular theory of wellbeing, although it does impose some costs onto objective list views. You might think that this dependence is weighty evidence in favour of desire-satisfaction theories of wellbeing, which say that my welfare consists in the actual satisfaction of desires I hold, but both hedonism and objective list theories are also able to accommodate the dependence. In this essay, I first distinguish between three ways in which my prudential good might depend on what I care about, and argue that the strongest reading presupposes a desire satisfaction account of wellbeing. Then, I outline how each theory might explain the intuitively-true weaker readings, arguing that they all have the resources to do so. Finally, I conclude that although objective list theories must adapt slightly to accommodate this dependence, no theory emerges as decisively more plausible than another due to the dependence.

There are at least three readings of the claim that what is good for me depends on what I care about. In order of increasing strength:

1. Association: what I care about is reliably predictive of what is good for me. A third party who knew the former would (in general) be better-able to correctly arrive at the latter than one who did not.

2. Causal dependence: in general, changes in what I care about change what is good for me.

3. Essential connection: what is good for me is fundamentally connected to what I care about, in that changes in the latter invariably, necessarily affect the former.

Both (1) and (2) are intuitively plausible. For (1), it seems like people who know me better will indeed have a better grasp of what is good for me, and in part this is because they understand my personal values, goals, projects, and preferences – i.e., what I care about. Similarly, for (2), it seems like if my priorities in life change – for example, I start a family, or take up a new hobby – the kinds of activities and actions which are good for me will also change.

Claim (3), however, is harder to provide intuitive justification for. There seem to be counterexamples:

Grass Obsession. George lives an ordinary life with a fulfilling job and loving family. One day, he wakes up and has a newfound passion for counting blades of grass. This interest is strong, but not overwhelming (i.e., he still cares about his family and work, but less so than before). He takes no pleasure in the activity – it is perfectly neutrally-valenced – but nonetheless he feels a great pull towards grass-counting.

Is it really the case that what is good for George has changed, presumably to now involve counting blades of grass? One could maintain that it has, but it is difficult to explain why without simply asserting that he now cares about grass-counting. It cannot be that grass-counting is good for him because he enjoys it (since by stipulation he doesn’t), and it doesn’t seem to deliver any goods that we would associate with a flourishing life.

So the explanation of why what is good for George has changed will need to rely on the brute fact that he does care about counting grass – i.e., that what is good for a person (at least partly) consists in what they care about being realised. But this simply presupposes preference-based theories of welfare! The objective list theorist or hedonist, who argue respectively that wellbeing consists in (i) the obtaining of certain objectively-valuable goods or (ii) the balance of pleasure over pain, will deny that wellbeing (at least partly) consists in what someone cares about being realised. Claim (3) does not have grounds to support it beyond those already in favour of preference-based accounts of welfare, so claiming that this sort of essential connection exists is not independent decisive evidence in favour of preference-based theories like the desire satisfaction account. For this reason, I will set it aside in what follows.

Perhaps desire satisfaction theories are better-able to explain why (1) and (2) hold, however. Certainly it follows that if my welfare does consist in the actual satisfaction of desires I hold, then changes in what I care about will change what is good for me (indeed, in every case, not merely in general), and also that third parties who know what I care about can (perfectly) predict what is good for me. But, as I will now show, both hedonist and objective list accounts are roughly equally capable of explaining (1) and (2), insofar as they hold.

Let us start with hedonism. Even if we hold that wellbeing simply consists in the balance of pleasure over pain, it is relatively easy to explain why what I care about is predictive of what is good for me: engaging in activities I care about will generally be more pleasurable than engaging in ones I am indifferent towards. More vividly:

Happy Day. Harriet would like to have a maximally-happy day – she wants to increase the pleasure she experiences and decrease the pain to the greatest possible extent. However, she must entrust all decisions about what she does on this day to someone else (nominated by her in advance). She can choose uninformed Umberto, who knows nothing about her at all, or informed Ingrid, who has a highly detailed and accurate understanding of what Harriet cares about.

It seems fairly obvious that Harriet would delegate the decisions to Ingrid – knowing what Harriet cares about makes it much likelier that Ingrid will select the activities that generate the most pleasure possible for Harriet. Moreover, if during the day what Harriet cared about dramatically changed, it seems like Ingrid’s plans would no longer be as good for maximising pleasure as before. The fact that Harriet’s priorities changed suggests that she is now interested in different sorts of activities, and will find the previously-planned ones less enjoyable than otherwise. So, hedonist theories of welfare seem perfectly-able to explain why what is good for me depends on what I care about.

Objective list theories are also able to explain this dependence, albeit less straightforwardly. For (1), note that virtually all objective list theorists accept that the balance of pleasure over pain is among the goods whose possession contributes to a person’s wellbeing. We can therefore apply the same argument as in the case of the hedonist: insofar as what I care about affects what I enjoy, it is predictive of what I will find pleasurable – and thus predictive of what is good for me, since pleasure is among those goods. (2) is more difficult to accommodate. The objective list theorist believes that there is some external standard of what is good for a person – so changes in what I care should surely not change what is good for me.

Here, the objective list theorist might turn to a resonance account of the good, which says that X is good for S iff and because X is objectively good for a person, and S takes pleasure in having X. There are independent reasons to adopt resonance accounts – in particular, they address the concern that it’s unintuitive that X could be good for S if she is firmly indifferent (or even actively opposed) towards it. But they also allow for objective list theories to address (2) using the same machinery as (1): changes in what S cares about generally change what S enjoys, and by the resonance account change what is good for S. So objective list theories are also able to accommodate both (1) and (2).

In this essay, I distinguished between three potential kinds of dependence between what someone cares about and what is good for them, and argued that the strongest presupposed preference-based accounts of welfare. Then, I argued that objective list and hedonist theories were not meaningfully less capable of explaining the weaker two readings than desire satisfaction accounts are. So, we do not have decisive reasons to prefer desire satisfaction accounts than any other on the basis of this fact, even though superficially they seem to be the most favoured by it.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• The “depends on what I care about” faultline is really between subjective vs objective views.
  • Remember that there are different types of hedonism: attitudinal vs objective.
    • So you might argue that no theory is decisively favoured since there’s a bunch of overlap between them.
  • Both hedonism and desire satisfaction can fall into the first group, if for hedonism we specify it with an attitudinal account (X is pleasurable if S wants X to continue).
  • Pure objective list theories are, obviously, objective. So is hedonism, if we take pleasure to be something identifiable independently of a subject’s attitudes.
• Be more precise about what we mean by “care about”.
  • “S cares about X” isn’t identical to “S desires X” (cf how it’s about priorities, projects, etc).
  • But you can be more precise that caring about something might require persistent, emotionally invested, reflectively-endorsed desire for it.
  • (I was thinking about doing this in the Grass case as a caveat to strengthen it that it is an endorsed desire.)
• Could use the framing that we’re looking at whether good-for-me is instrumentally dependent on what I care about, or constitutively dependent.
  • And then the Grass Obsession case seems to show that it’s not constitutively dependent, i.e. desire satisfaction accounts over-predict how close the relationship is.
  • So we have mild evidence against those theories.
• Could push even harder on reading (3): it looks false since we think that value is prior to desire.
  • (Raz and Aristotle – for X to be good for S, then X needs to be choiceworthy in some non-relational sense).