My current best guess on what constitutes welfare/wellbeing/value (setting aside issues of aggregation):
1. Suffering is bad in itself.
2. Pleasure doesn’t matter in itself.
3. Conscious disapproval might be bad in itself. If bad, this could capture the badness of suffering, since I see suffering as affective conscious disapproval (an externalist account).
4. Conscious approval doesn’t matter in itself in an absolute sense (it may matter in a relative sense, as covered by 5). Pleasure is affective conscious approval.
5. Other kinds of preferences might matter, but only comparatively (in a wide/non-identity way) when they exist in both outcomes, i.e. between a preference that’s more satisfied and the same or a different preference (of the same kind?) that’s less satisfied, an outcome with the more satisfied one is better than an outcome with the less satisfied one, ignoring other reasons. This is a kind of preference-affecting principle.
Also, I lean towards experientialism on top of this, so I think the degree of satisfaction/frustration of the preference has to be experienced for it to matter.
To expand on 5, the fact that you have an unsatisfied preference doesn’t mean you disapprove of the outcome, it only means another outcome in which it is satisfied is preferable, all else equal. For example, that someone would like to go to the moon doesn’t necessarily make them worse off than if they didn’t have that desire, all else equal. That someone with a certain kind of disability would like to live without that disability and might even trade away part of their life to do so doesn’t necessarily make them worse off, all else equal. This is incompatible with the way QALYs are estimated and used.
I think this probably can’t be reconciled with the independence of irrelevant alternatives in a way that I would find satisfactory, since it would either give us antifrustrationism (which 5 explicitly rejects) or allow that sometimes having a preference is better than not, all else equal.
My current best guess on what constitutes welfare/wellbeing/value (setting aside issues of aggregation):
1. Suffering is bad in itself.
2. Pleasure doesn’t matter in itself.
3. Conscious disapproval might be bad in itself. If bad, this could capture the badness of suffering, since I see suffering as affective conscious disapproval (an externalist account).
4. Conscious approval doesn’t matter in itself in an absolute sense (it may matter in a relative sense, as covered by 5). Pleasure is affective conscious approval.
5. Other kinds of preferences might matter, but only comparatively (in a wide/non-identity way) when they exist in both outcomes, i.e. between a preference that’s more satisfied and the same or a different preference (of the same kind?) that’s less satisfied, an outcome with the more satisfied one is better than an outcome with the less satisfied one, ignoring other reasons. This is a kind of preference-affecting principle.
Also, I lean towards experientialism on top of this, so I think the degree of satisfaction/frustration of the preference has to be experienced for it to matter.
To expand on 5, the fact that you have an unsatisfied preference doesn’t mean you disapprove of the outcome, it only means another outcome in which it is satisfied is preferable, all else equal. For example, that someone would like to go to the moon doesn’t necessarily make them worse off than if they didn’t have that desire, all else equal. That someone with a certain kind of disability would like to live without that disability and might even trade away part of their life to do so doesn’t necessarily make them worse off, all else equal. This is incompatible with the way QALYs are estimated and used.
I think this probably can’t be reconciled with the independence of irrelevant alternatives in a way that I would find satisfactory, since it would either give us antifrustrationism (which 5 explicitly rejects) or allow that sometimes having a preference is better than not, all else equal.
More here, here and here on my shortform, and in this post.