Alienation, Deprivation, and the Well-being of Persons

Benjamin Yelle

Utilitas, 2014, vol. 26, issue 4, 367-384

Abstract: While many theories of well-being are able to capture some of our central intuitions about well-being, e.g. avoiding alienation worries, they typically do so at the cost of not being able to capture others, e.g. explaining deprivation. However, both of these intuitions are important and any comprehensive theory of well-being ought to attempt to strike the best balance in responding to both concerns. In light of this, I develop and defend a theory of well-being which holds that our well-being depends, in part, on the nature of our well-being qua person, a class whose members are defined by their possessing certain cognitive and volitional capacities including those capacities constitutive of autonomy. I argue that this ‘person-centred’ theory of well-being is able to address concerns about alienation and deprivation, along with capturing the importance of autonomy to well-being, better than many popular subjective and objective theories of well-being.

Date: 2014
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