PESSIMISM, WELL-BEING, AND THE GOODNESS OF LIVES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Moral philosophers have long sought to define what constitutes a good life, or what things make a life go well for the person living it. Common candidates are achievement, friendship, knowledge, among others. Typically, it is widely assumed that these goods are often attainable, leading to the belief that life is generally worth living. However, a significant debate in nineteenth century German philosophy challenged this assumption. Philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, history’s most famous advocate of pessimism, argued that a deeper, unbiased examination of human life – characterized by futile striving and pointless suffering – would reveal that existence is something to be regretted rather than celebrated. Schopenhauer even suggested that the world’s non-existence would be preferable to its existence. This view, known as philosophical pessimism, sparked extensive debates, particularly during what became known as the “pessimism dispute” as thinkers grappled with the question of whether life is worth living. This dissertation is a concerted effort to rejoin pessimism and propose a philosophically satisfactory account of how life, in many cases, is worth living. Schopenhauer himself made the fatal error of assuming that life is worth living only if there is a highest good, where goodness gets construed as a state of affairs that is valuable simpliciter. However, he fails to consider how prudential value can still render a human life worth living. While Schopenhauer’s pessimism does not ultimately succeed, there are contemporary reformulations of pessimism, for instance from David Benatar, that still require refutation. In this dissertation, I contend that while contemporary pessimism remains plausible, there is nevertheless a novel hybrid theory of well-being that can account for why many lives are ultimately worth living. In fact, a decisive reason to favor the hybrid theory over its competitors is the extent to which it resolves various philosophical problems posed by contemporary pessimists better than alternative accounts of well-being.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".