Well-being, Ill-being, and everything in between: What Does It Mean for Well-Being to Come in Degrees?

The concept of ill-being raises important questions about the quantitative structure of well-being. This chapter investigates how different theories of well-being can account for the quantitative structure of well-being. It argues simple monistic theories, such as quantitative hedonism, can straightforwardly account for degrees of well-being. However, their simplicity also makes them vulnerable to objections. Subjectivist theories, like desire-satisfactionism, face the challenge that it is not clear whether desire-satisfaction contributes to well-being in absolute or relative terms. Both options, however, raise significant problems for the theory. Finally, pluralistic theories face the challenge of how to combine the different goods into a single quantitative structure. The upshot of the chapter is that monistic theories have a clear advantage over pluralistic theories in accounting for the quantitative structure of well-being, but that existing monistic proposals face their own challenges.