Colloquium: Eden Lin (Ohio State)

Department: Philosophy

Date and Time: April 27, 2018 | 3:00 PM-5:00 PM

Event Location: HIB 55

Event Details


Title: "Pleasure, Pain, and Pluralism about Well-Being"

It is plausible that if your life does not contain a sufficiently favorable balance of pleasure over pain, then you are not very high in welfare, no matter what else your life is like. It might be thought that pluralistic theories of welfare cannot accommodate this. Because any pluralistic theory will posit at least one basic good distinct from pleasure, it seems that any such theory will imply that you can be very high in welfare in virtue of having enough of this basic good, no matter how bad your life is in hedonic terms. In this paper, I defend pluralistic theories against this objection. After responding to the simplest version of the objection, I present and answer increasingly sophisticated versions of it. Along the way, I also explore some issues concerning the structure of pluralistic theories.

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