An Introduction to Ill-Being

A person can be better or worse off. Lives can go better or worse. How does this happen? The obvious and natural suggestion is that lives vary in terms of how much good they contain, and how much bad. That is to say, the overall level of one’s well-being is a function of both the good contained within the life and the bad contained within it. Somewhat more precisely, there are elements which themselves directly contribute to a life going badly or well.1 By talk of “direct contribution” I mean that these are the very constituents of well-being. Life going well, or better, consists in the presence of the various goods; its going badly, or less well, consists in the presence of the various bads. Of course, different theories of well-being disagree concerning what the positive and negative constituents are. But I take it that any reasonable theory of well-being will include not only intrinsically positive elements but also intrinsically negative ones as well. The point I am making is easily illustrated by thinking about hedonism. According to the hedonist, well-being consists in the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. The more pleasure, the better the life. Obviously enough, on a view like this, we can also say that the less pleasure the life contains, the worse it is. But the crucial point for our purposes is that when thinking about the ways in which a life can go less well, hedonism doesn’t limit itself to talking about the mere absence of pleasure. On the contrary, according to hedonism not only is there a