E.G.

It is widely and, I think, correctly thought that if

The desire-satisfaction account of well-being: For any individual S, S's well-being consists in S's desires being satisfied, such that S is made better off by S's desires being satisfied and is made worse off by S's desires being frustrated.

is true, then well-being is not important in its own right. Of course, the things you want are often good for you, and many of the things you want might also be important in their own right. So, it's often great for you when your desires are satisfied, and satisfaction of your desires might also signal that something important in its own right has happened. But in any case it seems clear that desire satisfaction is not itself important in its own right. This is what is shown by cases of pointless desire, such as Rawls's grass-counter case.

There is a common understanding, I think, that well-being is obviously important in its own right. Indeed, well-being may be the only thing that is important in its own right. And even if that's not so, it nevertheless seems clear to many of us (including me) that well-being has a special kind of importance in its own right. If your life is going well for you, that's wonderful: wonderful in its own right, and wonderful in some special way. The desire-satisfaction account doesn't fit with this common understanding, so it's got to go.

***

In view of these points we may decide to give

The hedonist account of well-being: For any individual S, S's well-being consists in S's hedonic state, such that S is made better off by S's enjoyment of pleasurable experiences and is made worse off by S's being subjected to painful experiences.

a chance. But I think this view also fails to fit with our common understanding. 

In a stirring paper, Neil Sinhababu claims that phenomenal introspection reveals pleasure's goodness. He writes:

Just as one can look inward at one's experience of lemon yellow and recognize its brightness, one can look inward at one's experience of pleasure and recognize its goodness. When I consider a situation of increasing pleasure, I can form the belief that things are better than they were before, just as I form the belief that there's more brightness in my visual field as lemon yellow replaces black. And when I suddenly experience pain, I can form the belief that things are worse in my experience than they were before.

And in a footnote he writes:

Occasionally I doubt that pleasure is really good. Seeking evidence, I eat or drink something with a pleasant taste. When I consider my experience, I become convinced again.

I agree with Sinhababu that pleasure is good and that we can see that it is good by attending to it while we are experiencing it. But pleasure seems not to have the special kind of importance that well-being has. I think this is what is shown by reflection on cases like Nozick's experience machine.

It's really, really important that my future will contain stretches of time in which I'm doing well. That this is important is obvious, I think. It's at least important to me. I assume it's also important to those who care about me. Perhaps we should say further that it is important to everyone (whether they know it or not), or important simpliciter (if there is any sense in the notion of importance simpliciter).

Getting clear about how best to characterize the importance in question might be a difficult job. But in any case, that there is some sort of importance in my future well-being strikes me as fully obvious.

By contrast, if my future will contain stretches of time in which I am experiencing some kind of pure, objectless pleasure—let's say I'll be hooked up to an experience machine that will give me this pleasure—this does not seem to be obviously important. In fact, I am tempted to say that it is obviously unimportant, considered in itself, even if the magnitude of the pleasure is large.

I'm tempted to say that. But I think it would be going too far to say that. I think it is safer to say this: If being hooked up to that kind of machine is a way of doing well in life, and if that's the only way of doing well that I've got available to me, then it's important that I find some way to hook myself up to that machine. But if (as I suspect) being hooked up to such a machine isn't a path to genuine well-being, then the pleasure given to me by such a machine might be (probably is) good but is not especially important.

***

In a frequently quoted piece, Kurt Vonnegut recalls something his uncle used to say:

[W]hen we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Uncle Alex sounds a bit like Sinhababu, but there's a crucial difference. Uncle Alex is observing that this is nice, where 'this' refers to a full scenario that he is currently in. He is not (at least not directly) talking about this or that isolated sliver of the scenario. For example, he's not talking about the pleasurableness of the lemonade.

It's funny, by the way, that both Sinhababu and Vonnegut talk about lemons.

When Uncle Alex says that this is nice, I think he is talking about what I intend to be talking about when I talk about well-being. He isn't analyzing well-being. He is just noticing that well-being obtains in the scenario.

***

In a vignette approach to well-being, we do as Uncle Alex does. We set aside the project of trying to analyze well-being. Instead we look at full scenarios in which it is clear to us that well-being occurs. We use these scenarios as analogical guides, or paradigms. This vignette approach, I think, may be sufficient for most of the purposes that a full analysis of well-being could be fit to serve. For example it may be usable for resolving disagreements about whether a given individual is well off or not.

A vignette approach cannot address certain forms of skepticism about the importance of well-being. Here is an argument:

(1) If there is no plausible analysis of well-being that identifies constituents of well-being that are important in their own right, then well-being is not important in its own right.

(2) There is no plausible analysis of well-being that identifies constituents of well-being that are important in their own right.

Therefore, well-being is not important in its own right.

We may feel that this argument needs an answer. If so, then, in order to rebut the second premise, we may feel the need to go on searching for a plausible analysis of well-being that will reveal it as something of importance in its own right.

I am not sure that this argument does in fact need an answer. It may be that, in view of the fact that well-being is obviously important in its own right, we are entitled to simply assume that either (a) well-being is unanalyzable yet still important, so the first premise is false, or (b) well-being is capable in principle of being analyzed in some way that would show the second premise to be false.