Well-being and Prudential Value

Abstract

When we talk about well-being we often also talk about what is "good for" a person. The fact that we use the term "good" suggests that there is a kind of value here. Philosophers tend to call this "prudential value" to distinguish it from value of other kinds, such as aesthetic value or moral value. Surprisingly little attention is given in the philosophical literature to the relationship between prudential value and well-being. Often, they are simply regarded as synonyms (in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example [Crisp 2008]). In this paper I shall argue that it is useful to make a distinction between these two separate, but closely related, notions and that a recognition of this distinction, and an increased focus upon prudential value in certain circumstances, would be beneficial in the context of public policy. The Distinction When we say that a person has a high level of well-being, we tend to mean that his life is going well for him overall. In some cases a judgment about well-being may concern a person's whole life, but it is more usual to talk about somebody's well-being at a particular time. Sometimes we talk about specific kinds of well-being, such as psychological or social well-being. In these cases we are concerned with how well a person's life is going in a particular respect, rather than on the whole. Nevertheless, a judgment about someone's level of psychological or social well-being is still a judgment about how well his life is going overall in that respect. By contrast, when we talk about prudential value, we do not necessarily make any overall evaluation of a person's life. We may, of course, talk about the prudential value of a person's life itself--whether it is a good life for that person. But lives are by no means the only things that we evaluate in this way. We talk about all sorts of things, including objects, people, events, and states of affairs as being good or bad for people. When we talk about something's being good for a person, we mean that this thing makes, or tends to make, that person's life go better for her. But making such a judgment does not imply any judgment about how well her life is going overall. Indeed, the judgment that something is good for some person is entirely consistent with a judgment that the person's life is going badly overall. Thus, for example, when a condemned man eats his favorite meal on the eve of his execution, it is plausible that in some small way his enjoyment of the meal is good for him: it makes his life go a little bit better for him than it would have gone otherwise. Nevertheless, this is consistent with the fact that overall his life is going very badly indeed. We might say that the meal has positive prudential value for him, but that his level of well-being is very low. We can sum up the distinction by saying that well-being is what someone has if her life is going well for her; whereas something has prudential value for someone if it contributes to making her life go well. Some Points about Prudential Value Prudential value is a kind of value alongside other kinds, such as aesthetic value. It has a particular property that helps distinguish it from other kinds of value. Prudential value is always relative to a person or other welfare subject: something that has this kind of value is good for someone (or something). Other kinds of value aren't usually seen as having this kind of relativity: things are good simpliciter, not good for someone (although there are philosophical views that hold that certain kinds of value may be relative in a different way: to a certain cultural context or sensibility). Prudential value also has certain properties that it shares with some other kinds of value. It can be positive or negative: things can be good for someone or bad for someone. "Bad," in this context, does not mean merely "not very good," but is the opposite of good: "bad for" is to "good for" as "concave" is to "convex," not as "big" is to "small. …