Resonance, Alienation, and Cognitive Subjectivism about Well-Being

Abstract Subjectivism about well-being contends that welfare goods are determined by agents’ psychological pro-attitudes. Its principal attraction is that it is well-equipped to abide by the resonance constraint, the highly intuitive stipulation that a welfare good must not alienate the agent and thus must resonate with them. Cognitive subjectivists are committed to the Judgment Sufficiency Thesis (JST): having the cognitive attitude of belief/judgment that an object is non-instrumentally good for you suffices to make the object a non-instrumental welfare good. I argue that given the truth of the resonance constraint, this sufficiency thesis is false and that the concept of resonance relevant to well-being is not guaranteed to be established by cognitive attitudes alone. My argument rests on cases in which agents believe something is good for them while at the same time being alienated by it. Since the subjectivist program considers alien welfare goods impossible, subjectivists must reject the JST. I look at plausible idealization conditions a subjectivist might employ and I show that they are unable to rescue the JST. I also examine the idea of a distinctly cognitive species of resonance recently discussed in the well-being literature and conclude that it too is unable to help the subjectivist maintain the JST.