a good person take pleasure from the well being of others explain
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Answer:
Explanation:
If someone were to ask you what you want from life, how would you reply? Plausible answers might include: ‘to be happy’, ‘to be successful’, ‘to make a difference’, or perhaps ‘to experience as much as possible’. Whatever these aspirations mean in their detail, they capture various implicit assessments of what we think it means to live a life that is good for us. A recent psychological study presents interesting data that suggests that two of the things we might want in our lives – happiness and meaning – sometimes do not go together. In fact, some of the things that lead to a life being happy are negatively associated with it being meaningful, and some of the things that seem to confer meaning detract from happiness. If this occasional incompatibility is in fact the case, does this mean that we must sometimes make a decision about which to pursue?
Many philosophers have tried to formulate metrics by which to assess how well a person’s life is going for her. The concept often invoked in this debate is that of well-being: if we can determine the person’s level of well-being (perhaps averaged over her life so far), then we can see how well her life is going for her. Philosophers tend to agree that the things that improve a person’s well-being (e.g. circumstances, experiences) are things that are ultimately good for that person. Being ‘ultimately good’ means that they are valuable just because they pertain, not because of (or even despite) any further effects.
However, how we are to assess what actually contributes to our well-being is a topic of some debate. There are three main broad theories of well-being; ‘hedonism’ holds that to increase a person’s well-being, one needs only maximize that person’s experiences of pleasure and minimize her experiences of pain or suffering. In this sort of theory, a person’s life is going well for her if she has lots of pleasure and little pain. The second sort of theory – ‘desire-satisfaction’ theories – holds that having one’s desires satisfied is integral to well-being. On this sort of theory, the extent of a person’s well-being will depend on the extent to which that person has satisfied her desires.
Whilst these two types of theory make the routes to increased well-being contingent on what the person finds pleasurable or on what the person desires respectively, the third theory is objective, contending that the routes to accruing well-being are the same for everyone, regardless of what they actually like or care about. Known as objective list theories, the idea here is that there are certain things – like friendship, knowledge, health, and creative activity – which are good for people regardless of what they think of them. On these sorts of theories, a person’s well-being depends on their achieving certain items on this objective list.
The data from the psychological study suggest that following a hedonistic approach to life – if we understand this roughly as maximizing happiness – may not only be conceptually at odds with the alternative conceptions of well-being but might in some cases actually detract from well-being if well-being turns out to be dependent on one’s life being maximally or at least sufficiently meaningful. Let’s take a look at some of the results of the study.