Well-Being as Need Satisfaction

Marlowe Fardell

doi:https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v21i3.1283

Volume 21, Number 3
March 2022

ARTICLE

Well-Being as Need Satisfaction

Volume 21, Number 3, March 2022, Pages 354–395

https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v21i3.1283

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Abstract

This paper presents a new analysis of the concept of noninstrumental need, and, using it, demonstrates how a need-satisfaction theory of well-being is much more plausible than might otherwise be supposed. Its thesis is that in at least some contexts of evaluation a central part of some persons’ well-being consists in their satisfying certain “personal needs.” Unlike common conceptions of other noninstrumental needs, which make those out to be moralized, universal, and minimal, personal needs are expansive and particular to particular persons, generated rather by persons’ nonmoral personal commitments. Against objections to the contrary, I show how these are genuine necessities, since unlike mere desires and freely escapable aims, personal needs constitute objective, inescapable, and noncompensable practical requirements. The personal-need-satisfaction theory of well-being combines objectivity with subject-dependence in novel ways, and motivates well-being pluralism at the level of individual agency. Implicating necessity as it does in the structure of individual well-being, this account presents a robust challenge to ethical and political theories that rely on the intrapersonal aggregation of well-being to be unproblematic.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

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