What a Theory of Well-Being Might Be

This paper has two parts. Part 1 articulates and defends a naturalistic approach to the study of well-being. And part 2 offers a very brief sketch of a theory that might drop out of such an approach.

Part 1: Philosophers who write about well-being typically assume that "the best theory about the nature of [well-being] is the one which is most faithful to our ordinary concept and our ordinary experience. That experience is given by what we think or feel or know about well-being, both our own and that of others. The data which a candidate theory must fit, therefore, consist of the prodigious variety of our preanalytic convictions" (Sumner 1996, 10-11). While any approach to the study of well-being will make substantive philosophical assumptions, the assumptions underlying the "descriptive adequacy" condition are hardly obvious. Why assume that there is a single commonsense understanding of well-being? And why assume it accurately reflects the real nature of well-being? The history of science has taught us that even our most precious commonsense ideas can be confused or mistaken.

I propose an approach to the study of well-being that begins with a more modest, and philosophically familiar, assumption: We can talk about stuff even when we're quite ignorant or mistaken about its real nature. People who had deeply mistaken views about the nature of water, electricity, electrons, atoms, planets, stars, asteroids, combustion, disease, and light (this list could go on and on) nonetheless were able to talk about (refer to) those things. If we begin our study of well-being with this assumption, we can leave open the question of which of our "preanalytic convictions" about well-being are accurate. As long as our commonsense understanding of well-being (or light or species or electrons or genes, etc.) is accurate enough so we can reliably identify instances of it, scientists can then expand and deepen our understanding of it beyond commonsense.

The approach I propose involves two steps: (1) Identify a candidate condition - a psychologically real condition that scientists measure, study and learn about - that might plausibly be well-being. Notice that we must rely on our commonsense notion of well-being to identify candidate conditions. (2) Argue that that candidate condition answers reasonably well to our commonsense notion of well-being. This approach does not come with a guarantee of success. There may be no psychologically real condition that is a plausible candidate to be well-being. But the possibility of complete and utter failure is a virtue of this approach: The world might force us to dramatically revise, or even discard, our commonsense ideas. As it happens, however, I think there does exist a real condition that answers quite well to our commonsense notion of well-being.

Part 2: Many psychologists (e.g., Seligman, Fredrickson, Loewenstein, Diener, Lyubomirsky) have explicitly argued for the existence of what we might intuitively call "virtuous cycles" - self-maintaining causal processes that involve positive feelings and attitudes, positive traits, and successful interactions with the world. A wide range of psychological research, despite being animated by quite different assumptions about the nature of well-being, involves identifying and studying the elements and the dynamics of various virtuous cycles. Here are six highly simplified schematic representations of such cycles:

" Positive affect " →Broad-minded coping → Positive affect" (Fredrickson & Joyner 2002). 
" Positive affect → Extraversion → Social Support → Positive affect" (DeNeve and Cooper 1998).
" Altruism → Greater Life Satisfaction → Altruism" (Thoits and Hewitt 2001).
" Positive affect → Social support → Professional success → Positive affect" (Staw, Sutton and Pelled 1994).
" Optimism → Success → Optimism" (Seligman 1990).
" Healthy Attachment Styles → Healthy relationships → Healthy Attachment Styles" (Hazan & Shaver 1987; Crowell, Fraley, & Shaver 1999).

These are "closed" cycles (which psychologists sometimes call "upward spirals") but virtuous cycles can involve much more complex, open-ended causal relations among such states. My proposal is that not only are these virtuous cycles a fundamental unit of study in the empirical, psychological research on well-being, they are also the basic building blocks of well-being: A person's well-being involves their being enmeshed in some appropriate set of these virtuous cycles.