Are Subjectivists and Objectivists about Well-Being Getting at the Same Thing?

Abstract Subjectivism and objectivism are strongly supported by different cases. But participants in the debate between the two, and the debate about well-being generally, assume they are theorizing about the same thing: thus, one view must be mistaken. This creates a tricky situation I call “Well-Being Deadlock.” There are two ways of responding to Well-Being Deadlock: (A) retain the assumption that the views are getting at the same thing and argue that one is wrong about it (or that a hybrid of the two is correct) or (B) deny the assumption and argue that the views are getting at different things that have been conflated thus far. Given the difficulty of (A) and the fact that the literature has mainly pursued it over (B), I explore (B) in this paper. To do this, I first assess the two existing versions of (B), as well as a third possible one, and argue that they fail to satisfyingly dissolve well-being deadlock and don’t answer several important questions. I then motivate and fill out my own version of (B) that avoids these problems. On this view, there are two different kinds of well-being that have been conflated thus far which the cases involved in Well-Being Deadlock pry apart.