Social Theory and Practice

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published on April 2, 2020

Shane Gronholz

Welfare: Does Thinking Make It So?

According to what I call the judgment view about welfare, a subject S’s life is going well for S only if S judges that S’s life is going well for S. This means that a person’s welfare depends, at least in part, on that person’s own judgment about her welfare. According to this view, it is not possible for a person to have a life that is going well for her if she judges that it is not. In this paper, I challenge this view by showing that there can be cases where a person’s life is going well for her even if she does not judge that it is.