Blog post by Prof Roger Crisp (Professor of Moral Philosophy/ Director of the Uehiro Oxford Institute)
At the invitation of Professor Beatrix Busse, I was recently lucky enough to be asked to participate in the fifth anniversary celebrations of the European University of Well-being (E-Uni-Well), held in Cologne.
EUniWell – the European University for Well-Being – is one of 65 European University Alliances, selected for funding by the European Commission under the ERASMUS+ programme in 2020. It currently includes eleven universities: Birmingham (UK), Cologne (Germany), Florence (Italy), Inalco (France), Konstanz (Germany), Linnaeus (Sweden), Murcia (Spain), Nantes (France), Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Semmelweis (Hungary), and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine).
I was asked to give a plenary address on the nature of well-being, and explained how the debate in western philosophy has primarily been between hedonism (the view that well-being consists in net pleasure) and what Derek Parfit called ‘objective list accounts’, according to which, though pleasure does matter, so do certain ‘objective goods’, such as accomplishment or friendship. At the end of the C19, a third view started to develop, according to which well-being is to be understood with reference to desire-satisfaction. I explained how this view is misguided, since the satisfaction of desire, in itself, never makes one better off — any goodness in such cases must come from what the desire is for. Parfit’s wonderful ‘addiction’ case demonstrates this well, in his famous ‘Appendix I’:
‘I tell you that I am about to make your life go better. I shall inject you with an addictive drug. From now on, you will wake each morning with an extremely strong desire to have another injection of this drug. Having this desire will be in itself neither pleasant nor painful, but if the desire is not fulfilled within an hour it will then become very painful. This is no cause for concern, since I shall give you ample supplies of this drug. Every morning, you will be able at once to fulfil this desire. The injection, and its after‐effects, would also be neither pleasant nor painful. You will spend the rest of your days as you do now.’ (Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 442)
I ended my presentation by outlining so-called ‘welfarism’, understood as the view that all value and reasons ultimately rest on well-being, a view I myself accept even in the case of so-called ‘epistemic reasons’ (so any reason you have to believe anything depends ultimately not on evidence, truth,or justification, but solely on the extent to which that belief promotes well-being).
The other talks and presentations at the conference were fascinating and varied, and it was wonderful to be able to converse — to my shame, only in English — with academics and students from across continental Europe committed to scholarship and sharing a commitment to and interest in well-being.