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I.
THE HORIZON PROBLEM AND SUBJECTIVE THEORIES OF WELL-BEING
Many individuals are strikingly limited in what they can appreciate about their lives. I shall refer to deficiencies in a person's ability to see the circumstances of her life as they really are as deficiencies of horizon. The image of the horizon seems apt, since literal horizons set the limits of what we can see and, in the types of cases I discuss here, both external environmental barriers and internal psychological barriers place limits on what individuals can 'see' or appreciate about their own lives. In addition to being troubling in their own right, limited horizons pose a serious problem for subjective theories of well-being, welfare or personal good. (I treat these terms as synonymous.) In what follows, I shall refer to this as the horizon problem.
The dominant trend in the theory of well-being is towards subjective theories. As I shall use the term, 'subjective' theories of well-being are those theories that make the determination of a person's good fully depend on the actual or hypothetical attitudes or sensations of the individual herself. These theories are popular for a number of reasons.
First, subjective theories fit well with the common view that well-being is highly individually variable and with the equally common intuition that many of the determinants of well-being are either psychological in nature or dependent on the psychological activities of the individual. For example, although few philosophers are hedonists these days, most recognize that positive quality of experience is a significant contributor to well-being. Yet positive quality of experience is an entirely psychological phenomenon. Further, most people think that having significant values and commitments that shape and give meaning to one's life is necessary for well-being. But although the things valued are typically not psychological, valuing is a psychological activity of particular agents.
Second, many find it hard to believe that anything lacking the appropriate link to our psychology (actual or hypothetical) could really turn out to be good for us. Since subjective theories build an account of well-being directly out of highly individualized psychological materials, they seem well positioned to capture these intuitions.
While subjective theories come in many varieties, the most plausible and currently popular versions - desire theories...