Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The nature of well-being has long been a central question in philosophical ethics. In a series of studies we tested lay support for three theories of well-being: hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. Participants were presented with vignettes where they were asked to judge which of three options would be best for a given individual, each corresponding to one of the three theories. Our findings suggest considerable variation in the criteria for well-being people employ in different contexts, especially for people of different ages. Hedonism and objective list theories garnered the most support, for older and younger individuals respectively. Desire theories received very little support. These results cast doubt on the acceptability of desire theories of well-being to much of the public and offer suggestive evidence for what might be called contextualist conceptions of well-being among the folk, perhaps lending some support to philosophical views of this sort.