Introduction

Problems with “good minus bad” views

Wellbeing is often defined as the balance of that which is good for oneself over that which is bad for oneself. For instance, hedonism typically equates wellbeing with pleasure minus pain, and preferentialism often sees wellbeing as the difference between fulfilled and unfulfilled preferences. Similarly, objective list theories may posit multiple independent goods and bads that contribute to one’s overall wellbeing.

A crucial challenge for these “good minus bad” conceptions of wellbeing is their reliance on an offsetting theory of aggregation. That is, they assume that any independent bads can always be counterbalanced or offset by a sufficient addition of independent goods, at least at the individual level.

This offsetting premise has more problems than are commonly recognized, including the often sidelined question of what justifies it in the first place (Vinding, 2020a, 2022). Interpersonally, it plays a key role in generating moral implications that many would consider unacceptable, such as ‘Creating Hell to Please the Blissful’ (Ajantaival, 2022a, sec. 2.5; 2022b). At the individual level, it implies that a rollercoaster life containing unbearable agony and a sufficient amount of independent goods has greater wellbeing than does a perfectly untroubled life. These issues highlight the importance of exploring alternative conceptions of wellbeing that do not rely on the offsetting premise.

Minimalist alternatives

Minimalist views provide a unique perspective by rejecting the notion of independent goods. Instead, they define things that are good for us in entirely relational terms, namely in terms of the minimization of one or more sources of illbeing.^[1] These views avoid the problems specific to the offsetting premise, yet they are often overlooked in existing overviews of wellbeing theories, which tend to focus only on the variety of “good minus bad” views on offer.^[2] However, not only do minimalist views deserve serious consideration for their comparative merits, they can also, as I hope to show in this post, be positively intuitive in their own right.

In particular, I hope to show that minimalist views can make sense of the practical tradeoffs that many of us reflectively endorse, with no need for the offsetting premise in the first place. And because many minimalist views focus on a single common currency of value, they may be promising candidates for resolving theoretical conflicts between multiple, seemingly intrinsic values. By contrast, all “good minus bad” views are still pluralistic in that they involve at least two distinct value entities.^[3]

Although minimalist views do not depend on the idea of an independent good, they still provide principled answers to the question of what makes life better for an individual. Moreover, in practice, it is essential to always view the narrow question of ‘better for oneself’ within the broader context of ‘better overall’. In this context, all minimalist views agree that life can be worth living and protecting for its overall positive roles.

This essay delves into a selection of minimalist views on wellbeing, not intending to provide an exhaustive survey, but to give a sense of their diversity and intuitive appeal. For instance, experientialist minimalist views like tranquilism remain aligned with the “experience requirement”, which is the intuition that a person’s wellbeing cannot be directly affected by things outside their experience.^[4] In contrast, extra-experientialist minimalist views like antifrustrationism or objective list minimalism reject the experience requirement, and can thus be consistent with the intuition that premature death can leave us worse off, such as when it results in preference frustration, violation of autonomy, or uncompleted life projects.^[5]

The next section will outline some of the main problems with the offsetting premise. The rest will explore what might be the most intuitive ways to think of wellbeing without it.

Reasons to doubt the offsetting premise: A brief overview

The offsetting premise posits that any independent bads can always be counterbalanced or offset by a sufficient addition of independent goods.

To motivate the exploration of minimalist views of wellbeing, this section will briefly outline some of the main reasons to doubt the offsetting premise, summarized mostly from Vinding (2020a, 2022) and Ajantaival (2022a, 2022b).^[6]

1. Lack of comprehensive defenses: Major defenses of offsetting theories often lack comprehensive defenses for their main premise, even though the offsetting premise has been rejected in various ways and faces additional challenges compared to minimalist views. (These various rejections and challenges are outlined below.)
2. Problems with existing defenses: Many existing defenses of the offsetting premise rely on thought experiments intended to show that alternative views would have implausible implications. Yet these thought experiments tend to be unconvincing for a number of reasons. Specifically, such defenses …
   1. … tend to be confounded by various other issues and practical intuitions that are not supposed to influence our judgment in the relevant cases.^[7]
   2. … often presume the existence of “higher” states above a subjectively flawless or perfectly undisturbed state to begin with. Yet a strong case can be made that a perfectly undisturbed state is rarely if ever reached during our waking hours, and that undisturbed states are plausibly the hedonic ceiling (Knutsson, 2022).
   3. … rarely address extra-experientialist minimalist views that avoid the purportedly implausible implications without relying on the offsetting premise.
   4. … rarely attempt to demonstrate that the implications of minimalist views would be worse than those of offsetting views. A ‘side-by-side’ comparison provides reason to think that the opposite is the case: that the minimalist implications are comparatively the least repugnant.
3. Various views reject the premise: The offsetting premise has been rejected in various ways, such as by the views below. (The first two will not be explored further in this post.)
   1. Incommensurate value entities: Wolf (1997) holds that pleasure has intrinsic value, but denies that pleasure can outweigh suffering.
   2. Lexical priority views centered on severe bads: Lexical views grant categorical priority to certain value entities relative to others, and such views are often centered on severe bads. For instance, many people have the intuition that torture-level suffering cannot be counterbalanced by any purported good.^[8]
   3. Minimalist views: Minimalist views entirely reject the notion of independent goods, and instead understand good in relational terms. Closely associated is the normative view that ethics is about solving problems and not about creating unneeded goods that do not relieve anyone’s burden (“non-relieving goods”).
4. Additional challenges compared to minimalist views: It is widely accepted that severe bads can outweigh milder ones, such as when we prioritize severe suffering over minor pains in triage situations. Yet this notion of “negative outweighing”, shared by both offsetting and minimalist views, is fundamentally different from the additional offsetting premise, according to which problematic states could be “canceled out” or “made up for” by the creation of unneeded goods elsewhere. The offsetting premise thus faces the additional challenges of how to justify …
   1. … that subjectively unbearable agony, or any bads in the first place, could be counterbalanced by non-relieving goods (as well as what these goods are, and why some of them are better than others).
   2. … why a rollercoaster life of “unbearable agony plus a sufficient amount of non-relieving goods” has greater wellbeing than does a perfectly untroubled life.
   3. … why offsetting views would be more plausible in the context of population ethics, given that they share all the most “repugnant” features of minimalist views while introducing additional sources of repugnance.^[9]
5. A priori reasons to doubt phenomenological dual opposites: Offsetting views are sometimes defended with reference to a phenomenologically positive counterpart to suffering. Yet the idea of such dual opposite dimensions of experience is less parsimonious and less simple than a view without such opposites.^[10] Additionally, it is unclear whether the notion of phenomenological opposites even makes sense, and what it would be like for two experiential states to be dual opposites.
6. Lack of introspective evidence: A direct argument against the existence of a phenomenological counterpart to suffering is that, for many of us, introspection yields no sign of such a counterpart. When we introspectively examine various candidates of positive experiences, we seem to find no phenomenological properties that would render them dual opposites of suffering. (Readers are encouraged not to take this claim on authority, but to earnestly pursue this introspective exercise themselves.)
7. Deflationary or debunking explanations for why we might believe in a positive counterpart: There are reasonable alternative explanations for the belief in a positive counterpart to suffering:
   1. A misprojection of our common tendency to think in terms of positive and negative real numbers: We tend to think in terms of real numbers and standard addition, since they offer a powerful conceptual framework that is perfectly valid in many contexts. Consequently, we might project these numbers onto our experiences, even if introspection or other evidence might ultimately fail to support such a conceptual representation in this domain.^[11]
   2. Confusion between relative and absolute “pluses”: People might mistake a reduction in discomfort (a relative “plus”) for a genuinely positive experience (an absolute “plus”), when in fact the latter may not exist. For instance, see Sherman (2017, p. 8; sec. 11.2), Gloor (2017, sec. 2.1), and Knutsson (2022, sec. 5.2).^[12]

The variety of minimalist views

Experientialist views

Experientialist views hold that a person’s wellbeing cannot be directly affected by things outside their experience (van der Deijl, 2021). Experientialist minimalist views define wellbeing as the degree to which we are free from one or more experiential sources of illbeing, such as pain, suffering, disturbance, or a visceral non-acceptance of our current experience. Such views often draw inspiration from the Buddhist or Epicurean philosophical traditions.

At first glance, the various kinds of experientialist minimalist views may seem to differ in only semantic or aesthetic ways, and they arguably are more similar to each other than are extra-experientialist views. Yet they still differ substantially in how they understand the nature of experiential wellbeing.

For instance, some views might posit that the unpleasant quality of an experience is intrinsically bad for us in an objective or ‘attitude-independent’ way, regardless of our own stance on it. By contrast, other views are more subjective or ‘attitude-sensitive’, in that they equate wellbeing with things such as the degree to which we ourselves wish for our experience to change. Tranquilism, in particular, postulates that no experiences are inherently desirable or undesirable (Gloor, 2017, sec. 5).

Buddhist minimalism

Some minimalist views of wellbeing are based directly on Buddhist ideas. For instance, according to philosopher and scholar of Buddhism Daniel Breyer (2015), the Pāli Buddhist tradition understands wellbeing as consisting in the cessation of dukkha (suffering, ‘dis-ease’, dissatisfaction), with other factors being good for us only insofar as they contribute to the cessation of dukkha.

Epicurean minimalism

Similar minimalist views may be inspired by the Epicurean tradition. For instance, a kind of minimalist hedonism results from rejecting offsetting hedonism’s concept of positive pleasure at the descriptive level and adopting instead the following Epicurean-inspired concepts of kinetic and static pleasures. (These ideas are traced to their sources and are explored much further in Sherman, 2017, and Knutsson, 2019, 2022.)

1. Kinetic pleasure: “Kinetic pleasure is the active removal of a pain” (Sherman, p. 53). It is “what results from fulfilling a desire” or when a “lack or need is being removed” (cf. Knutsson, 2019). It is what we usually call pleasure, yet it is actually not an independent good but rather a temporary relief from a prior experiential disturbance.
2. Static (katastematic) pleasure: Static pleasure is the upper limit that the kinetic, remedial pleasure leads up to: “a condition of absolute contentment in mind and body” (Sherman, p. 106). There is no higher pleasure: “The limit of pleasure is reached with the removal of all pain”; freedom from all pain is the summit of pleasure (cf. Knutsson, 2022).^[13]

Together, these concepts are taken to cover all experiences of pleasure. For instance, “joy is active, the removal of mental pain, while tranquillity is the static state of being without [any] distress” (Sherman, p. 53). Thus, there are ultimately just more or less disturbed experiential states, and according to Epicurean-inspired minimalist views, greater wellbeing consists in reducing our experiential disturbances.

Contraction-based minimalism

In various interviews and conversations, meditator Roger Thisdell has outlined a minimalist view of wellbeing that is rooted in his own phenomenological observation. The view is formulated in the following terms.

1. Contraction versus pleasure: All experiences contain some level of unpleasantness or disturbance, which Thisdell refers to as ‘contraction’. This contraction exists at a more concrete, phenomenologically pinpointable level than does pleasure. Pleasure is, on closer inspection, more akin to a comparative judgment that occurs after experiencing a relief from contractive pressure (cf. the Epicurean notion of kinetic pleasure).
2. Betterness and cessation: As one feels less and less contraction (and thus more expansion), one feels better and better. However, the complete absence of disturbance is only achieved in moments when all experiences and phenomenology cease. This undisturbed state is, according to Thisdell, what meditators refer to as ‘cessation’.^[14]

Tranquilism

Tranquilism as proposed by Lukas Gloor (2017) is a view of wellbeing inspired by Buddhist and Epicurean ideas. It understands wellbeing in the following way.^[15]

1. Wellbeing and cravings: Wellbeing is the degree to which we are free from experienced cravings, which are defined as need-based, visceral desires to change our current experience.^[16] Cravings are what make an experience bad for us. For instance, the sensation of pain, without any craving for it to end, is not intrinsically bad according to Gloor. (2.2)
2. Optimal states: Optimal states are free from aversive components and from cravings for more pleasure. They include states of contentment such as meditative tranquility and flow states, as well as all subjectively flawless states of inner peace, dreamless sleep, and non-consciousness. (2.1, 3)
3. Pleasure and cravings: Pleasure, understood as a sensation that increases our hedonic level, can be valuable for its roles in preventing and protecting against the formation of cravings. But the absence of unneeded pleasure is entirely unproblematic. A pleasureless state of consciousness, if free from all cravings, is considered perfectly optimal and happy. (2.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5)

In other words, tranquilism emphasizes our ‘inside view’ and considers all subjectively untroubled states as optimal because they are not experienced as suboptimal. By contrast, offsetting hedonism entails the ‘outside view’ that more pleasure would always be better for us, even if we do not crave or desire it.^[17]

Extra-experientialist views

Preferentialist views

Offsetting preferentialism holds that (1) satisfied preferences are good for us, (2) frustrated preferences are bad for us, and (3) the former can offset the latter.^[18]

In contrast, professor of philosophy Christoph Fehige (1998) has defended a view called antifrustrationism (henceforth “AF”), which holds only the second premise:

We don’t do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don’t have a frustrated existence. … Maximizers of preference satisfaction should instead call themselves minimizers of preference frustration. (p. 518)

A similar view has been expressed in the past by Peter Singer (1980): “The creation of preferences which we then satisfy gains us nothing. We can think of the creation of the unsatisfied preferences as putting a debit in the moral ledger which satisfying them merely cancels out.”^[19]

The main difference between experientialist minimalist views and AF is that, according to AF,

People need not be aware of their preferences; what counts is rather the attitude they would have towards something if they fully represented it. (Fehige, 1998, p. 509)

See also the explanation and defense of negative ideal preference utilitarianism found in the Negative Utilitarianism FAQ.

Conditional interests versus teleological goods

Closely related to AF are views centered on conditional interests, as defended by philosopher Johann Frick (2014, 2020).^[20] These views are structurally similar to AF, except they apply to interests rather than preferences (St. Jules, 2019). (One may think that we can have interests in something without necessarily having a preference for it, or a preference for something that is not in our best interest.)

Frick’s view gives us reason to be skeptical of the concept of intrinsic value, as it criticizes the “teleological view of wellbeing”, which holds that wellbeing is something to be promoted. In Frick’s words (emphases mine):

According to the teleologist, the appropriate response to what is good or valuable is to promote it, ensuring that as much of it exists as possible …

Next, note that viewing some value F as to be promoted implies that there is no deep moral distinction between [1] increasing the degree to which F is realized amongst existing potential bearers of that value, and [2] creating new bearers of that value. (Frick, 2020, pp. 63–64)

By contrast, Frick argues that we never have unconditional reasons to bring about new instances of wellbeing as a teleological good.^[21] What instead matters is individuals’ degree of wellbeing conditional on their existence, that is, whether their interests are satisfied or violated if they exist. Thus, by analogy to how AF is about the minimization of frustrated preferences, one can understand Frick’s view to be about the minimization of violated interests: we have reasons not to violate interests, but we do not have reasons to create them, all else equal.^[22]

In other words:

• It is better for beings that their interests are satisfied, if they exist.
  • For instance, it is better for existing beings to acquire a higher quality of life, if they have such an interest.
  • Yet our wellbeing is not increased by acquiring new satisfied interests, all else equal.
• It is bad for beings when their interests are violated, if they exist.
  • For instance, it is bad for existing beings to die, if they have an interest to exist.
  • Yet it is not bad for nonexistent beings to not come into existence for their own sake, all else equal, because only existing beings can have an interest to exist.

Objective list views

Lastly, there are minimalist versions of objective list views. Objective list views of wellbeing typically claim that various objective goods contribute independently to our wellbeing, where these objective goods may include things like personal achievements, knowledge, and autonomy.

Minimalist versions of objective list views can retain largely the same list of objective goods, yet the important difference is that they construe these “goods” purely in terms of the absence of bads.

As described by Vinding (2023) regarding the purported objective goods of autonomy and virtuous conduct:

For example, rather than seeing autonomy as an objective good that can bring our wellbeing above some neutral level, the absence of autonomy is seen as an objective bad that detracts from our wellbeing, placing us below a neutral or unproblematic state of wellbeing; and having full autonomy can at most bring us to an untroubled or unproblematic level of wellbeing. … Rather than seeing virtue as an objective good that contributes positively to wellbeing, vice is seen as an objective bad that contributes negatively, and virtue may be understood as the mere absence of vice (cf. Kupfer, 2011; Knutsson, 2022, sec. 4). And so on for any other purported objective good.^[23]

The list of objective bads that matter independently to our wellbeing may include things like compromised health, false beliefs, ignorance, premature death, uncompleted life projects, being constrained, being discriminated against, being exploited, being manipulated, being subjected to violence, and so on.

Objective list views need not entail that such objective conditions are the only things that matter to our wellbeing, but merely that certain objective conditions also matter. In other words, one may think that our wellbeing consists in both our objective conditions and our experiential states.

This brings us to the more general point that the individual views explored in this essay need not be endorsed as standalone views, but can instead be combined into a wide variety of minimalist hybrid theories of wellbeing. For example, one may endorse a minimalist view according to which experiential states, ideal preferences, conditional interests, and objective conditions all contribute independently to our wellbeing. This gives a sense of the potential flexibility and variety of minimalist views of wellbeing, and a sense of how there are many reasonable alternatives to “good minus bad” views.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for helpful comments by Eleos Arete Citrini, Anthony DiGiovanni, Barry Grimes, Simon Knutsson, Winston Oswald-Drummond, Michael St. Jules, Roger Thisdell, and Magnus Vinding.

Main references

Ajantaival, T. (2022a). Peacefulness, nonviolence, and experientialist minimalism. Ungated, EA Forum.

Ajantaival, T. (2022b). Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant. Ungated, EA Forum.

Anonymous. (2015). Negative Utilitarianism FAQ. Ungated.

Breyer, D. (2015). The cessation of suffering and Buddhist axiology. Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 22, 533–560. Ungated.

Crisp, R. (2021). Well-Being. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 ed.). Stanford University. Ungated.

DiGiovanni, A. (2021). Tranquilism Respects Individual Desires. Ungated.

Fehige, C. (1998). A Pareto Principle for Possible People. In Fehige, C. & Wessels, U. (Eds.), Preferences, 508–543. Walter de Gruyter. Ungated.

Fletcher, G. (2016). The Philosophy of Well-Being: An Introduction. Routledge. DOI.

Fox, J. I. (2022). Does Schopenhauer accept any positive pleasures?. European Journal of Philosophy. Ungated.

Frick, J. (2014). ‘Making People Happy, Not Making Happy People’: A Defense of the Asymmetry Intuition in Population Ethics. [PhD thesis, Harvard University]. Ungated.

Frick, J. (2020). Conditional Reasons and the Procreation Asymmetry. Philosophical Perspectives, 34(1), 53–87. Ungated.

Gloor, L. (2017). Tranquilism. Ungated.

Knutsson, S. (2019). Epicurean Ideas about Pleasure, Pain, Good and Bad. Ungated.

Knutsson, S. (2022). Undisturbedness as the hedonic ceiling. Ungated.

Knutsson, S. & Thisdell, R. (2023). Roger Thisdell on undisturbedness, positive experiences, and the hedonic peak. Ungated.

Schroeder, M. (2018). Value Theory. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 ed.). Stanford University. Ungated.

Sherman, T. (2017). Epicureanism: An Ancient Guide to Modern Wellbeing. [MPhil dissertation, University of Exeter]. Ungated.

van der Deijl, W. (2021). The sentience argument for experientialism about welfare. Philosophical Studies, 178(1), 187–208. Ungated.

Vinding, M. (2020a). On purported positive goods “outweighing” suffering. Ungated.

Vinding, M. (2020b). Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications. Ratio Ethica. Ungated.

Vinding, M. (2022). A phenomenological argument against a positive counterpart to suffering. Ungated.

Vinding, M. (2023). Minimalist versions of objective list theories of wellbeing. Ungated.

Appendix: Expanding the Epicurean notion of freedom from all pain

At first, we may find implausible the Epicurean notion that the highest pleasure is  freedom from all pain. Yet we might find it more intuitive once we unpack the full meaning of “all pain”. As expanded in Knutsson (2022, sec. 2.1), a completely undisturbed state is entirely free from any bothersome instances of a long list of things, including:

• ache, agitation, agony, alienation, angst, anguish, annoyance, anxiety, boredom, compression, confusion, contempt, dejection, depression, desolation, despair, desperation, discomfort, discontentment, disgust, dislike, dismay, disorientation, dissatisfaction, distress, dread, embarrassment, enmity, ennui, envy, fear, frustration, gloominess, grief, guilt, hatred, heartbreak, horror, hopelessness, humiliation, hurting, impatience, indignation, insecurity, irritation, jealousy, loneliness, longing, loathing, loss, malaise, melancholia, nausea, nervousness, pain, panic, queasiness, regret, rejection, remorse, resentment, restlessness, sadness, shame, sorrow, stress, suffering, tension, terror, throb, tiredness, trouble, unease, unsafety, vexation, want, weariness, Weltschmerz, worry;
• feelings of being or having been betrayed, disliked, exploited, harmed, let down, neglected, treated badly, underappreciated, unloved, unwanted, or used;
• feelings of being or having been a burden on, bad for, or harmful to others;
• feelings of meaninglessness;
• feelings of effort, resistance, and struggle;
• feeling burdened, constrained, lack of control, overworked, stuck, threatened, unfortunate, unfree, unlucky, or weak;
• feeling damaged, decaying, declining, defective, ignorant, ill, incompetent, like a bad person, like a failure, like an impostor, low self-esteem, stupid, ugly (or that part of oneself is ugly), unclean, unhealthy, worthless, or of low worth.

Notes

1. ^{^}

   I use the term ‘relational value’ as a synonym for ‘instrumental value’ in order to hopefully avoid its misleading connotations. These connotations may lead us to perceive this value narrowly or unwisely as “merely instrumental… merely a tool”, or as somehow diminished relative to the actual importance of the value in question.

2. ^{^}

   This seems true of at least the introductions by Fletcher (2016), Crisp (2021), Utilitarianism.net, and the Happier Lives Institute. This is despite the existence of various defenses of minimalist views of wellbeing in the philosophical literature, such as by Schopenhauer (1818/1819, “the negative nature of all satisfaction”; 1851, “negative in its character”; see also Fox, 2022, “pleasures of distraction”), Fehige (1998), Breyer (2015), Sherman (2017), and Knutsson (2021, “about negative well-being”). Additional defenses of minimalist views are found throughout the present text.

3. ^{^}

   For some arguments that might motivate a preference for monism, see e.g. the debate between monists and pluralists on the topic of value incommensurability (Schroeder, 2018, sec. 2.2.3).

4. ^{^}

   Experientialist minimalism rejects the notion that death (or non-existence, or non-consciousness) could be harmful for an individual’s own sake (i.e. the ‘comparative’ or ‘deprivationist’ account of harm, cf. Fletcher, 2016, ch. 8). After all, it denies any independent good that one could be “missing out on” or “deprived of” solely for one’s own sake. Yet while most of the extra-experientialist views examined in this essay agree that death can leave us worse off, it is worth noting that experientialist minimalist views too (just like experientialist offsetting views) can support practical reasons to strongly oppose painless killing at the normative level. These reasons include preserving relationally positive roles, lives, and norms.

5. ^{^}

   Not all objective list theories reject the experience requirement, but the ones I examine do, hence the categorization used in this brief essay.

6. ^{^}

   Some of the points may overlap with each other. They are numbered primarily for readability.

7. ^{^}

   These confounders also include misleading framings that are prone to paint a picture that is far from what a proponent of minimalist views would endorse as a neutral or accurate representation of their views. For instance, beings may be described as experiencing states of “mere neutrality” — of being “reduced” or “not particularly happy” — which may evoke the presence of experiential bads in scenarios where every being is actually supposed to be feeling perfectly untroubled.

8. ^{^}

   A comparison of the “repugnant conclusions” implied by lexical and non-lexical views, in both their offsetting and minimalist versions, is found here.

9. ^{^}

   A counterexample might be replacement arguments, where purely consequentialist versions of experientialist minimalist views would imply that there is nothing suboptimal about replacing any world with an empty world (“cessation”). Yet how repugnant are such cessation implications if we already assume a purely consequentialist and experientialist view? After we properly account for the consequentialist equivalence between cessation and non-creation, it becomes clear that this question is equivalent to the question of how repugnant it is not to create any set of experiences for their own sake. And here one may argue that non-creation is wholly non-repugnant. (Other minimalist views may consider cessation suboptimal due to extra-experiential bads such as preference frustration.) By contrast, the replacement implications of consequentialist offsetting views seem worse, including the implication to replace perfectly untroubled lives with rollercoaster lives.

10. ^{^}

    Specifically, the assumption of dual opposites implies a more bloated and less sparse ontology, and goes against old ideals of avoiding unnecessary postulations in our explanatory models. (Thanks to Simon Knutsson for comments on this point.)

11. ^{^}

    More broadly, we may be culturally influenced by a deep history of thinking in terms of polar opposites, such as ‘good–bad’, ‘positive–negative’, and ‘right–wrong’. Yet this way of dichotomous, dualistic, or absolutizing thinking is not the only way of thinking. And we might not even come up with it ourselves if we had grown up within a culture of thinking in relative or comparative terms. (Thanks to Simon Knutsson for comments on these points.)

12. ^{^}

    Additionally, Fox (2022) explains how Schopenhauer maintained that all pleasures feel only relatively good because they are either (1) “pleasures of satisfaction”: satisfying a prior lack or need, or (2) “pleasures of distraction”: reducing our awareness of those existing lacks or needs. Both types of pleasure correlate with a relative freedom from felt dissatisfaction, explaining why we often mistake them for inherently positive experiences instead of relatively positive changes compared with our preceding states. (A third type of “relatively positive experience” could be the prediction-based anticipation of future changes that are relationally positive for preventing some dissatisfaction that we intuitively care about, even if this dissatisfaction is not currently ours.)

13. ^{^}

    For more on this idea, see the Appendix.

14. ^{^}

    Regarding how common this view is, Thisdell thinks that many people familiar with deep meditation might agree that there is no higher state than a completely peaceful one, but that many such people might not use an analytical framework that would lead them to compare the value of individual states in this isolated manner.

15. ^{^}

    By itself, tranquilism is an experientialist minimalist theory of wellbeing. Yet the author also notes in many places that tranquilism is only intended to be a theory of momentary experiential wellbeing and not a standalone moral theory, emphasizing how it is compatible with views that incorporate non-experiential aims.

16. ^{^}

    Cravings, a subtype of desires, are different from preferences and reflection-based desires. Gloor understands preferences as abstract constructs present at all times, whereas he understands desires as “activated” preferences or conscious goals. (Gloor, 2017, sec. 2.2)

17. ^{^}

    This respect for ‘inside’ over ‘outside’ desires about experiences is also the focus of two brief defenses of tranquilism by Vinding (2020b, p. 49) and DiGiovanni (2021).

18. ^{^}

    Preference-based views are also called “desire theories”, and philosophers tend to use the words “preferences” and “desires” to mean the same thing. I will use the words “preferentialist views” and “preferences” so as to maintain a clear contrast to desire-based experientialist views such as tranquilism.

19. ^{^}

    It is worth noting that Singer (1980) wrote favorably of combining Preference Utilitarianism and Classical Utilitarianism. Yet Singer appears to have moved further toward Classical Utilitarianism in recent years (see e.g. Lazari-Radek & Singer, 2017, ch. 3).

20. ^{^}

    Frick’s thesis and paper have also inspired the conditional interest views that have been explored on the EA Forum by Michael St. Jules (2019a, 2019b) and Lukas Gloor (2022).

21. ^{^}

    Similarly, Frick (2020, pp. 65–66) finds it striking how the teleological promotion approach seems even more problematic for moral values other than wellbeing, such as “[justice,] liberty, equality, fairness, honesty, fidelity, loyalty, promise keeping, gratitude, charity, health, safety, etc.”:

    None of these values appear even remotely plausible as candidates for “promotion” [in the teleological sense]. For instance, while we recognize strong moral reasons to make people free and equal, freedom and equality clearly do not require us to create new people so that they, too, may instantiate these values.

22. ^{^}

    As Michael St. Jules (2019) put it: “We accomplish no good by creating and then satisfying an interest, all else equal, because interests give us reasons for their satisfaction, not for their existence or satisfaction over their nonexistence.”

23. ^{^}

    Note that minimalist objective list views can also support the view that premature death is bad (Vinding, 2023): “not only may these views consider premature death to be bad because it entails many other objective bads (e.g. death would prevent us from completing our life projects), but these views may also see premature death itself as an objective bad.”