IS WELL BEING OBJECTIVE OR SUBJECTIVE? There are a number of things we need to get clear on in answer this question, one of which is whether the subjective feeling/perception/awareness of one's well-being is a necessary condition of being well off. Note that Robert Nozick's famous "experience machine" hypothetical, in which we a placed in to a box and have all the (subjective) experiences we would have if we were living a full and rich life, but are not actually living one, only suggests that subjective awareness isn't a sufficient condition for being well off. That is, we could feel all the things we would be feeling if we were well off, but we aren't really well off. Nozick's point in this seems to be true, though I'm surprised at the resistance it gets when I talk it over with friends. They are not sure, exactly, why one wouldn't opt for the experience machine, if one felt exactly the same as if one were living and full and rich real life. To be sure, why living the experience machine life would be awful is hard to articulate. We have to talk in terms of "being out of touch with the real" and "not making an actual impact on the world." These things are hard to make sense of in the abstract, they are slippery. But at the same time, I do think that they actually refer to something. Now, I brought up Nozick because even if his intution is right, the subjectivists still may have a point: they may say that awareness of one's well-being is a necessary condition of being well off. If one does not know that one is well off, then one is not ipso facto well off. (A side note, I have been using "awareness' of being well off rather than something like "feeling pleasure" to avoid attacking a simple pleasure based view of subjective welfarism). But I want to suggest that subjective awareness of one's being well-off isn't even a necessary condition of being well off, at least in some respects. That is to say, while it may be the case that many elements of well-being do require subjective awareness, that is not the case will all of them. One can be benefitted, one can be made better off, without one being aware of it.

Consider two cases. 1) The first is inspired by Thomas Nagel, in a passing remark in his essay on "Death." He says that surely we are worse off if all our friendships turned out to be not really friendships, even though they appeared to be friendships. In fact, all of our friends behind our back said terrible things about us and laughed at us. It is clear that we would not have friends in this case. Nor are we benefitted by having such "friends." In fact, we are made worse off (I would argue) even though we appear to have friends. A life with such friends is a poorer life. One is worse off. This may be the case even if one never learns that one's friends were false friends, and is sort of ignorantly happy throughout one's life.

One may wonder if this is just the experience machine case transposed to the arena of friendship. It may only show that subjective awareness is a condition, but not a sufficient condition of well being. But I'm not sure. Might one also be beneffited from having friends one doesn't know one has? Can one have friends this way (friends, objectively speaking)? And if one can have friends this way, can they benefit you just by being your friend, or do they have to benefit you in some tangible way? I don't think so. Perhaps it is enough that another person thinks well off you, even if he doesn't directly benefit you. This may be the case in forgotten friendships, or friendships one thought have ended. The other person, in fact, still thinks of you and thinks well of you, and you think well of the other person. But neither of you is aware of the other's care and good feeling. Are you thereby benefitted by it? Is it absurd to say that you could be benefitted from it?

2) And consider the fact, which I think is obvious, that one's well being can improve after one's death. For one's life consists of a number of projects and plans, not all of which can be complete during one's alloted time of life. One could have children and wishes for them, for instance, and they only can fulfil those wishes after you have died. Nonetheless, there seems to me a clear sense in which you can say: that person's life is made better by the fact that his plans worked out, that he got what he wanted, even though he wasn't around to enjoy them. And certainly there is no subjective awareness when one is dead. Yet, one's well-being can be changed and improved (or degraded) after one's death. Owen Flanagan once gave a lecture where he told of how is dog loved to play fetch and to roll around in the sun in Flanagan's front yard. When the dog died, Flanagan buried him in the front yard. I like to think that the dog was made better off by this act, that his well-being was increased by being buried in a certain way, in a certain place.

This idea of one's well being improving after death has two aspects worth noticing. First, I think it is intimately connected to the idea of one's life as a story. The only thing I emphasize here is that the end of one's story is not co-terminus with the end of one's life. There is no fixed length to one's story (consider how the story of Flanagan's dog goes even up until where the dog was buried). Indeed, one's story could even begin before one's birth. Is it a subjective matter how we date the beginning and end of one's story? My objectivist side wants to say that it isn't, that there are better and worse ways of placinging the beginning and end points of one's life. Does this become absurd at certain points? Does the fact that a play by Shakespeare has changed one's life make it the case that this is an event in Shakespeare's life, that it's part of Shakespeare's story? Surely Shakespeare's story has to end sometime, but when? (One thinks about the lives of the saints, and how their stories continue on in the miracles that they perform after they die: but does one necessarily have to believe in this kind of thing to believe that one's story goes on after one's death?)

Further, believeing that one's story can go on even after one dies may lead one to take a different view towards death. Perhaps one reason we are sad about death is that it means we will never finish all our projects, and will thereby not be benefitted by seeing them come to completion. But if we instead see our well-being as extending beyond our death, then we may be more open to letting others complete what we have started, because our story is implicated in the project, and the success of that project is our success. I wonder if the idea of subjective well-being is linked to an idea of being in control: that we are the ultimate arbiters of when we are happy or when we are made better off (only things that I have chosen or done can make me happy). One might see the idea of objective well being as showing that this is not the case, that many contingencies can make us happy or not, because one's life plan is broader than those things one controls or subjectively experiences.

Again, I enter the caveat I mentioned above. All I am saying is that welfare can't be purely a subjective concept; it can't be the case that we are only made better off if we are aware of being better off (or even could potentially be aware of being better off). There are things that make our life better even if we don't know about them, and could never learn about them.
- posted by Chad @ Wednesday, June 01, 2005