Preferences and Well-Being

Preferences are often thought to be relevant for well-being: respecting preferences, or satisfying them, contributes in some way to making people\'s lives go well for them. A crucial assumption that accompanies this conviction is that there is a normative standard that allows us to discriminate between preferences that do, and those that do not, contribute to well-being. The papers collected in this volume, written by moral philosophers and philosophers of economics, explore a number of central issues concerning the formulation of such a normative standard. They examine what a defensible account of how preferences should be formed for them to contribute to well-being should look like; whether preferences are subject to requirements of rationality and what reasons we have to prefer certain things over others; and what the significance is, if any, of preferences that are arational or not conducive to well-being.

• Provides a sustained analytical treatment of the politically salient issue of the justice of the market • Contributes to ongoing philosophical debates about egalitarian and anti-egalitarian theories of justice, and to developing the former • Offers and defends a new way of thinking about key and timely political values such as freedom and choice

Introduction Serena Olsaretti; 1. Desire formation and human good Richard Arneson; 2. Preference formation and personal good Connie S. Rosati; 3. Leading a life of one\'s own: on well-being and narrative autonomy Johan Brännmark; 4. Well-being, adaptation and human limitations Mozaffar Qizilbash; 5. Consequentialism and preference formation in economics and game theory Daniel M. Hausman; 6. Preferences, deliberation and satisfaction Philip Pettit; 7. Content-related and attitude-related reasons for preferences Christian Piller; 8. Reasoning with preferences? John Broome; 9. Taking unconsidered preferences seriously Robert Sugden; 10. Preferences, paternalism and liberty Cass R. Sustein and Richard H. Thaler; 11. Preference change and interpersonal comparisons of welfare Alex Voorhoeve.