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Well-being Monism Defended

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Abstract

In “Well-Being and Pluralism” (2021), Polly Mitchell and Anna Alexandrova defend conceptual pluralism about well-being. Conceptual pluralism about well-being holds that there are multiple, irreducible concepts of well-being that are employed in different contexts, all equally legitimate as concepts of well-being. Moreover, "Conceptual pluralism about well-being entails that there is no single essence which characterises all and only instances of well-being” (Mitchell and Alexandrova in J Happiness Stud 22:2411–2433, 2021). Conceptual monism about well-being, on the other hand, holds, at a minimum, that there is some essence that unites all legitimate uses of 'well-being'. In this paper, I will argue that there is a version of conceptual monism about well-being, the network theory of well-being defended by Michael Bishop in his book The Good Life (2015), that can secure all of the benefits of Mitchell and Alexandrova's conceptual pluralism, namely accommodating the wide range of uses of “well-being” in the sciences of well-being and in ordinary language. Mitchell and Alexandrova’s argument for pluralism depends on the inability of a monistic theory of well-being to account for this diversity of conceptions of well-being and the diversity of instruments used to measure well-being in the sciences. Bishop’s network theory, like Mitchell and Alexandrova’s pluralism, is designed to accommodate the scientific study of well-being. Because of this, it avoids the pitfalls of traditional, monistic conceptions of well-being despite its monistic credentials. I conclude with two novel arguments for the network theory.

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Notes

  1. Mitchell and Alexandrova (2021, p. 2424). Conceptual pluralism about well-being is often defended under the banner of “contextualism.” Mitchell and Alexandrova cite Darwall (2002), Campbell (2016), Alexandrova (2017), and Mitchell (2018) as examples of contextualists about well-being. I will stick with “conceptual pluralism” or “conceptual pluralism about well-being” for the sake of clarity.

  2. Constitutive pluralism is the view that “well-being refers to a particular, identifiable state [that] can be constituted by different properties or objects” (Mitchell & Alexandrova, 2021, p. 2422). Contrast this with conceptual pluralism, according to which there is no single state that can be identified across all instances of well-being.

  3. This was pointed out by an anonymous reviewer.

  4. More on PCN fragments below. For now, let it suffice that they are potential causal contributors to PCNs.

  5. Bishop (2015, p. 41). Bishop does not defend a network theory of ill-being, but he does suggest that some instances of ill-being can be profitably understood as negative or vicious causal networks. (2015, pp. 96-101).

  6. Bishop (2015, p. 42). See Csikszentmihalyi (2008) for more on the state of flow.

  7. Mitchell and Alexandrova (2021, p. 2413, Tables 1 and 2).

  8. Reproduction of Bishop (2015, Fig. 4.1) Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

  9. See Sect. 3.2.1 above for the quote from DeNeve and Cooper (1998).

  10. See, for example, (Kern et al., 2019) and (Arnold & Wade, 2015).

  11. Wissing argues that the “‘third wave of Positive Psychology’ was actually the beginning of a new scientific domain of well-being studies” (Wissing, 2022, p. 15). I take no stand on the issue of dividing Positive Psychology from the newly emerging well-being sciences in this manuscript.

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    Emelia Miller

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Miller, E. Well-being Monism Defended. J Happiness Stud 23, 3407–3427 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-022-00551-0

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