Health and Well-being

Recent philosophical work has emphasized the importance for well-being of physical and emotional health, especially having a fully intact human body that functions in an easy and unimpeded way and having a settled disposition towards those emotional states that undergird happiness and efficacious action. Although familiar forms of desire- satisfactionism and hedonism can recognize that it is usually instrumentally good for a person to be physically and emotionally healthy, these theories cannot acknowledge that such states are non-instrumentally good for a person. However, two recent accounts of well- being that claim to fare better on this score – Richard Kraut’s developmentalism and Daniel Haybron’s self-fulfillment theory – both face a different problem: they cannot successfully unify the various sources of personal benefit. I explain why this is so, before describing how my account, which construes well-being as agential flourishing, can do better.