Suppose you agreed with me that the science of well-being should strive to be value-apt, that mid-level theories is the way to provide value-aptness, and that all of this is compatible with scientific objectivity. Even so, you could still remain a skeptic about the very possibility of such a science. …
Here’s an attitude I sometimes encounter among scientists: “It is not my job as a scientist to figure out what true well-being is and to choose my constructs accordingly. My job is to study empirical relations between people’s subjective experiences and various factors, such as personality traits, behavior, socioeconomic …
Different people expect different things from theories of well-being. Some expect that they systematise in a maximally general way intuitions about goods that constitute well-being, others that they states most important causes of well-being, still others that they help them to lead a good life. I for one ask that …
My interest in what is now called the science of well-being dates back to my graduate school days at UC San Diego. Sometime in the mid-aughts I came across a debate between psychologists who advanced ‘hedonic profile’ measures of happiness and those who favoured life satisfaction questionnaires. The former argued …
Another book that may be of interest to The Brains Blog community is my Philosophical Foundations of Neurolaw, which is coming out next month. A major aim of the book is to provide an alternative to Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson’s treatment of issues in the philosophy of mind and …
It is my pleasure to introduce the latest in our series of symposia on papers from the journal Neuroethics. The focus of the current symposium is a forthcoming special issue of Neuroethics on Marc Lewis‘s book The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease (PublicAffairs, 2016). In his book, Lewis challenges the …
It’s my pleasure to introduce our third Ergo symposium, featuring Alex Madva’s “A Plea for Anti-Anti-Individualism: How Oversimple Psychology Misleads Social Policy” with commentaries by Saray Ayala-Lopez (California State University, Sacramento), Sally Haslanger (MIT), and Jennifer Saul (University of Sheffield). I’d like to thank each of the participants for their great …
