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WENDELL O'BRIEN
1. Two kinds of theories of well-being
Standard theories of personal well-being may be divided into two kinds: desire theories and substantive good theories.1 The basic idea of desire theories is that what is good for a person is the satisfaction of her desires or preferences, and that what makes something good for her is simply the fact that she desires it. The most straightforward of desire theories is the unrestricted actual desire theory, according to which all of one's actual desires count. The best life for a person is one in which she has many strong desires and as many as possible of them are gratified while as few as possible are ungratified. There are also restricted desire theories, in which certain kinds of desires are ruled out-anti-social desires, for instance, or desires that are not about one's own life, or one's own mental states. Finally, there are informed desire theories, which identify a person's good with what she would desire if she were rational, wellinformed, capable of `appreciating the true nature' of what she desires, and so on.2
According to substantive good theories, an assessment of a person's well-being involves a substantive judgment about what is good for her, a judgment that may conflict with her own judgment and which may identify as goods for her things she doesn't (and maybe wouldn't) desire. This contrasts with the central idea of desire theories, namely, that ultimately what is good for a person is determined by her own judgments and preferences.3 Substantive good theories make claims about what things are good for people-the usual suspects include love, friendship, pleasure, knowledge, moral goodness, and the appreciation of true beautyand they typically offer arguments for those claims. They may or may not give an account of what in general makes things good for people. It is worth noting that substantive good theories can hold that one of the things which contributes to a person's well-being is the satisfaction of her desires. But such theories, unlike desire theories, do not hold that the satisfaction of desire is the only thing which is ultimately good for a person.
Following Scanlon, I would classify classical hedonism as a substantive good theory, since it holds that one...