Originally published in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy volume 2, number 2 (2007), pages 1-27.

Main authors discussed: Daniel Haybron

In this essay, Daniel Haybron discusses what he calls “Aristotelian perfectionism,” which he takes to be a central feature of Aristotelian theories of well-being, i.e., a life that is good for the person living it. This is the thesis that “well-being consists, non-derivatively, at least partly in perfection: excellence of virtue—or, in the Aristotelian case, excellent or virtuous activity,” where such perfection is “the perfection of one’s nature: being a good specimen of one’s kind, for instance, or fulfilling one’s capacities well” (156).

Haybron’s thesis is that “perfection, excellence, or virtue probably forms no fundamental part of well-being.  …Or, alternatively, if perfection is fundamental to well-being, then it plays a smaller and very different role from that posited by Aristotelian accounts” (168). He makes the following 5 main points about perfectionism in support of this thesis.

1. Perfection and virtue often seem to have nothing to do with well-being (159-63). His arguments here are largely by example: the successful southern slaveholder, e.g., or the bloodthirsty Genghis Khan are rather poor specimens of human virtue and perfection, but intuitively this should not be bad news from the point of view of their well-being. Or consider an aging diplomat choosing between retiring a few years early to a relaxing life in Tuscany and staying on in her career long enough to take on one more, important, assignment. It seems clear, Haybron says, that there would be more virtue and a higher degree of human functioning involved in taking the assignment, but that retiring to Tuscany would make her better off. However, this is just what the perfectionist cannot say, insofar as perfectionism takes a life of greater virtue and higher functioning to be the same thing as a life of greater well-being (161-3).

2. There are cases where perfection and virtue pull apart from each other (163-8). Here Haybron considers the example of a man who assumes care of an autistic child, thereby showing “greater virtue” and making his life “more admirable.” Even so, Haybron says, this fellow now has to spend more time caring for the child than developing his own capacities, interests, and talents. As a result, his new life “involves a lesser exercise of his human capacities: his functioning is sharply constrained and inhibited” (164).

3. The perfectionist cannot give the right explanation of the importance of pleasure (165-8). While the perfectionist may make pleasure important for well-being as some species of perfection, it struggles to capture its importance for well-being as a kind of experience for the agent. Even worse, perfectionism cannot attach much importance to pleasure in the first place, since it takes pleasure to be more or less worthless as compared with virtue.

4. Even if perfectionists distinguish prudential value from perfectionist value, they are mistaken in thinking that one achieves the former by achieving the latter (168-70). Perfectionist value, unlike prudential value, “bears no necessary connection to anything that can plausibly be viewed as an organism’s goals” (169).

5. In many cases anyway, perfectionism seems to be based on a failure to disambiguate the question “How ought I to live?” (170-4). This could be either a question about what is a good and admirable way to live, or a question about what would make one well off. As a result, the question “What is well-being?” becomes conflated with the very different question “What is a good (admirable) life?”

Haybron concludes by suggesting that the motivating idea behind perfectionism is probably “welfare externalism,” the weaker thesis that well-being consists in the fulfillment of one’s nature as a human. Welfare externalism has not been the target of the above arguments against perfectionism, as Haybron notes, and should be given its own separate treatment elsewhere. (He does so in chapter 9, “Happiness, the Self, and Human Flourishing,” reviewed here.)

To my mind, Haybron’s objections are successful on the whole—successful, that is, against the perfectionist thesis that he targets. However, one may also wonder what is Aristotelian about so-called Aristotelian perfectionism. Haybron dismisses the question; he wants to address the perfectionist thesis itself without worrying about who has or has not held it (156, 158). Fair enough, but some readers who think of themselves as Aristotelians may not recognize Haybron’s targeted perfectionism as anything they believe. Whether he likes it or not, Haybron has opened that door.

This is not the place for a full-blown discussion of that question, so let the following observations suffice for the purposes of this review. Aristotelian eudaimonism is not just a theory about well-being, but a theory about well-being given the role that well-being plays in practical reasoning. As Aristotle puts it, eudaimonia is the “final end” (telos) in the sense that it is the only thing we seek for its own sake and never for the sake of anything further. In that way, it brings deliberation to a halt by giving a terminus to an otherwise unlimited series of “for the sake of” relations (Nicomachean Ethics I.1-2). In other words, eudaimonia is in the first instance supposed to give a way of connecting our various goals with the ultimate goal of well-being.

With that in mind, consider again Haybron’s objection that perfectionism “bears no necessary connection to anything that can plausibly be viewed as an organism’s goals” (169). Haybron is right: it is very difficult to see how the thought of “becoming a good specimen of my kind” could get me very far in organizing my goals for my life. However, that shows that such perfectionism is spectacularly ill-suited for the very role that eudaimonia was supposed to have played in an Aristotelian theory of practical reasoning in the first place. And that should certainly give us pause to ask whether so-called “Aristotelian perfectionism” really has had any place in the Aristotelian tradition at all, as Haybron assumes it has.

Reviewed by Daniel Russell
Wichita State University

Originally published in Utilitas volume 20, number 1 (2008), pages 21-49.

Main Authors Discussed: Daniel Haybron

This essay offers a provisional account of Haybron’s “self-fulfillment” view of well-being: well-being is the fulfillment of one’s nature as a unique individual. Haybron argues that such a view avoids both (1) the Scylla of subjectivist theories and (2) the Charybdis of “stringent” Aristotelian theories.

(1) Subjectivists, Haybron says, are right to make the agent’s perspective “sovereign” where his well-being is concerned. Unfortunately, they make it sovereign in the wrong way, so that even an agent’s happiness might not be important to his well-being if he doesn’t think it is. “Happiness” here is a long-term, broadly positive emotional condition, a “stance of psychic affirmation,” which is “not merely a state of one’s consciousness” but “more like a state of one’s being—not just a pleasant experience, or a good mood, but psychic affirmation or, in more pronounced forms, psychic flourishing” (182). Haybron’s main contention is that happiness is of great importance to one’s well-being, whether one thinks it is or not.

Haybron offers the example of Henry, whose passion is model trains but who chooses to be a farmer instead of running a model train shop. Henry is a successful farmer, and he thinks that farming is more worthwhile than running a hobby shop; but farming does not make Henry happy, whereas model trains do. Henry doesn’t mind this so much: he thinks that doing something more worthwhile is more important for his well-being than his happiness is. However, that shouldn’t settle things: surely Henry could be better off with a happier life, even if he doesn’t think so (179-82). Haybron’s task is to make sense of that idea without locating Henry’s well-being in things that don’t have enough to do with Henry.

To do this, Haybron locates well-being in self-fulfillment. The self here includes a sense of what individual one is, as well as how one is “disposed characteristically to be happy in certain circumstances and not others” (184). On Haybron’s view, there is a deep connection between happiness and the self: the things that (would) make one happy are central to the self; we could change what makes Henry happy only by changing who Henry is (178 180, 182-3, 187-8).

In order to be well off, says Haybron, one’s happiness must be “authentic”: (a) informed (enough) about the things about which one is happy, (b) autonomous, and (c) “rich”: “the authenticity of one’s happiness increases, other things being equal, to the extent that it is grounded in richer, more complex ways of living. For such ways of living more fully express one’s nature” (186). To be authentically happy is to be fulfilled in one’s “emotional nature,” and this fulfillment is a constituent of well-being (186-7).

I think that this insight is very significant, and that the connections Haybron recognizes between the fulfillment of the self, one’s emotional nature, and well-being are every bit as important as he thinks they are. Cases like Henry’s suggest that an agent’s judgment about his well-being is not the last word. Such judgments can fail to reflect one’s true self; what should be sovereign is not the agent’s perspective, but the agent’s self and true nature (190-1).

(2) Haybron shares with the Aristotelian tradition a view of well-being as “nature-fulfillment,” a view Haybron calls “welfare eudaimonism.” However, Haybron distinguishes himself from Aristotelians in several ways. (a) Haybron embraces what he calls “welfare internalism,” on which nature-fulfillment is the fulfillment of “the arbitrarily idiosyncratic make-up of the individual” (193). (b) Haybron claims that “[t]heories in the Aristotelian tradition are perfectionist,” holding that well-being consists in “the proper exercise of our distinctively human capacities” (193). (c) Haybron says that his view posits a “less intellectualistic view of human nature, placing a greater emphasis on its affective dimension as something that matters independently of its connection with reason” (193).

By locating well-being in the fulfillment of one’s individual nature, Haybron’s theory is objective without making one’s well-being something “alien”: happiness is objectively important precisely because of its intimate connection to the self (194-5). Welfare eudaimonism therefore avoids subjectivism, and does so in a way that avoids the “stringent” demands of Aristotelianism (195).

I find Haybron’s contrast with Aristotelianism problematic. I’m not sure what it means to think of our “affective dimension” independently of our reason; surely the fact that we are rational animals changes both what our emotional lives are like and how our emotional lives matter. Furthermore, it is not clear that Aristotelian theories are perfectionist in Haybron’s sense (I address this issue in my review of his “Well-Being and Virtue”reviewed here). Lastly, a very crucial idea here is one that he never discusses directly, viz. the thesis of welfare internalism. To be sure, he discusses the importance for well-being of self-fulfillment, but that is a point that Aristotelian “welfare externalism,” as he defines it, can also accept. Where the two views really part ways, as he sees it, is over the internalist claim that fulfillment of one’s individual nature is all there is to well-being, and that fulfillment as a human has nothing to do with well-being.

That claim is far from obviously true. Imagine a person who is incapable of love. Such a person would be a stunted human, but would still have his own “arbitrarily idiosyncratic make-up.” On Haybron’s view, as long as that make-up is fulfilled, there is nothing more to say about whether such a person would be well off. To be sure, Haybron says that “richness” is part of authentic happiness, since “richer, more complex ways of living … more fully express one’s nature” (186). But given welfare internalism, we must understand a “richer” activity as more complex than other activities that also express one’s nature, not as an activity that more fully expresses human nature. Richness requires that one not be a stunted version of oneself, but it allows that one might still be a stunted human being. Clearly, welfare internalism needs explicit defense, but Haybron offers none.

Reviewed by Daniel Russell
Wichita State University