EA - Minimalist views of wellbeing by Teo Ajantaival

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Minimalist views of wellbeing, published by Teo Ajantaival on July 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.IntroductionProblems with "good minus bad" viewsWellbeing is often defined as the balance of that which is good for oneself over that which is bad for oneself. For instance, hedonism typically equates wellbeing with pleasure minus pain, and preferentialism often sees wellbeing as the difference between fulfilled and unfulfilled preferences. Similarly, objective list theories may posit multiple independent goods and bads that contribute to one's overall wellbeing.A crucial challenge for these "good minus bad" conceptions of wellbeing is their reliance on an offsetting theory of aggregation. That is, they assume that any independent bads can always be counterbalanced, outweighed, or offset by a sufficient addition of independent goods, at least at the individual level.This offsetting premise has more problems than are commonly recognized, including the often sidelined question of what justifies it in the first place (Vinding, 2020a, 2022). Interpersonally, it plays a key role in generating moral implications that many would consider unacceptable, such as 'Creating Hell to Please the Blissful' (Ajantaival, 2022a, sec. 2.5; 2022b). At the individual level, it implies that a rollercoaster life containing unbearable agony and a sufficient amount of independent goods has greater wellbeing than does a perfectly untroubled life. These issues highlight the importance of exploring alternative conceptions of wellbeing that do not rely on the offsetting premise.Minimalist alternativesMinimalist views provide a unique perspective by rejecting the notion of independent goods. Instead, they define things that are good for us in entirely relational terms, namely in terms of the minimization of one or more sources of illbeing. These views avoid the problems specific to the offsetting premise, yet they are often overlooked in existing overviews of wellbeing theories, which tend to focus only on the variety of "good minus bad" views on offer. However, not only do minimalist views deserve serious consideration for their comparative merits, they can also, as I hope to show in this post, be positively intuitive in their own right.In particular, I hope to show that minimalist views can make sense of the practical tradeoffs that many of us reflectively endorse, with no need for the offsetting premise in the first place. And because many minimalist views focus on a single common currency of value, they may be promising candidates for resolving theoretical conflicts between multiple, seemingly intrinsic values. By contrast, all "good minus bad" views are still pluralistic in that they involve at least two distinct value entities.Although minimalist views do not depend on the idea of an independent good, they still provide principled answers to the question of what makes life better for an individual. Moreover, in practice, it is essential to always view the narrow question of 'better for oneself' within the broader context of 'better overall'. In this context, all minimalist views agree that life can be worth living and protecting for its overall positive roles.This essay delves into a selection of minimalist views on wellbeing, not intending to provide an exhaustive survey, but to give a sense of their diversity and intuitive appeal. For instance, experientialist minimalist views like tranquilism remain aligned with the "experience requirement", which is the intuition that a person's wellbeing cannot be directly affected by things outside their experience. In contrast, extra-experientialist minimalist views like antifrustrationism or objective list minimalism reject the experience requirement, and can thus be consistent with the intuition that premature death can leave us wors...