The Hedonist’s Dilemma

It is common to group theories of well-being into the following three categories: hedonism (the view that pleasure is the sole prudential good; pain the sole bad), desire-satisfactionism (a wide swath of views that claim, roughly speaking, that a person’s welfare depends on the satisfaction of her desires), and the objective-list (the view that prudential value is independent of an agent’s pro-attitudes toward purported goods). This taxonomy, however, is imperfect (which is not to say that it is not useful). Importantly, it seems to miss tremendous amounts of logical space– not all non-hedonist, non-objective list views must fall into the category of desire satisfaction. (Importantly, perfectionism comes to mind, as do various hybrid views.1) I propose the following tripartite grouping. In a rough-andready way, the first category, hedonism, suggests that pleasure is the sole prudential good for humans. The second category, subjectivism, holds that in explaining why φ is good for x, one must appeal to the x ’s agential endorsement of φ, most commonly some desire or preference. Finally, a third category is objectivism. Objective views insist that welfare goods need not be endorsed; objectivism denies that agential endorsement is a necessary condition on welfare. Objective theories can, in principle, evaluate lives by criteria independent of an agent’s various pro-attitudes, whether desiderative or otherwise. But this taxonomy is also a bit strange. One of these categories is not like the others. Logical space appears to be fully covered by the distinction between subjective theories, which suggest that a necessary condition for the prudential value of φ is agential endorsement of φ, and objective theories, which deny this. Where, then, does hedonism fall? There are options for the hedonist; hedonism can be construed subjectively or objectively. However, as I shall try to show here, this choice creates