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