Foundationalism About Wellbeing Measurement: A Defense

Foundationalism about wellbeing maintains that we can only know what the fundamental constituents of wellbeing are through philosophical reflection, but that knowledge about the causes and correlates of wellbeing measures are irrelevant to this pursuit. Recently, this view has been criticized, and an alternative has been proposed: coherentism. I first argue that coherentism faces a fundamental problem in the context of wellbeing measurement: it cannot function as desired without committing the naturalistic fallacy. I then reject the three arguments against foundationalism: none of these arguments provide us with a good reason to reject foundationalism.