Wellbeing as wholeness: Against the instrumental/intrinsic distinction – Mark Fabian

The Analytical philosophy of wellbeing standardly distinguishes what is intrinsically wellbeing – what is ‘good for’ somebody or of prudential value to them – from what is instrumental to wellbeing, that is, facilitates one to obtain prudential value.

This paper argues that while this distinction is helpful for honing our theories in the manner of Occam’s razor, it is mostly impeding our understanding of wellbeing. Thinking about how any canonical theory of wellbeing in philosophy would work in practice reveals that these theories are so interdependent as to be meaningfully indistinguishable. Behavioural welfare economics has recently demonstrated this extensively for desire satisfaction accounts, for example. 

Interdisciplinary theories, meanwhile, flag so many things as being necessary to wellbeing, and in a networked manner, that it is again largely meaningless to seek a fine-grained statement of what wellbeing is intrinsically. 

In light of these observations, this paper proposes the idea of wellbeing as wholeness. Wellbeing obtains when a range of factors in a person’s life and psyche fit together in a well way. This perspective mirrors recent work on network models of depression. It calls for philosophy to devote more thinking to things hitherto regarded as ‘merely’ instrumental to wellbeing.

Mark Fabian is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick in the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS). He is also an affiliate researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University. Previously, Mark was a Fulbright Scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He holds a BA in Philosophy and History, an MA in Development Economics, and a PhD in Economic Policy, all from the Australian National University.