My impression is that the term “life satisfaction” sees the heaviest use in psychology where full philosophical analysis of the necessary and sufficient properties of “life satisfaction” isn’t especially desired or useful. As long as it the term denotes a concept with some internal consistency and we all use the term in roughly compatible ways, we can usefully use it in measurements.
If you’re looking for a concept that’s a load-bearing part of your ethics, primarily psychological constructs like “life satisfaction” aren’t a great fit. I think the discussions you’d want to look at for these more philosophical purposes are discussions around eudaimonia, hedonia, etc.
Huh, I feel like the same issue would arise for (e.g.) eudaimonia, if we tried to spec out what it is we mean exactly by “eudaimonia.”
(My model here is that the psychological constructs are an attempt at specifying + making quantifiable concepts that philosophy had identified but left vague.)
Ah, yeah. I didn’t mean to suggest that the philosophers have it all worked out. What I meant is that I think the philosophers seem to share your goals. In other words, I (as a non-professional in either psychology or philosophy) think if someone came up to a psychologist and said, “I’ve come up with these edge cases for ‘life satisfaction’”, they’d more or less reply, “That’s regrettable. Moving on...”. On the other hand, if someone came up to a philosopher and said, “I’ve come up with edge cases for ‘eudaimonia’”, they might reply, “Yes, edges cases like these are among my central concerns. Here’s the existing work on the matter and here are my current attempts at a resolution.”
My impression is that the term “life satisfaction” sees the heaviest use in psychology where full philosophical analysis of the necessary and sufficient properties of “life satisfaction” isn’t especially desired or useful. As long as it the term denotes a concept with some internal consistency and we all use the term in roughly compatible ways, we can usefully use it in measurements.
If you’re looking for a concept that’s a load-bearing part of your ethics, primarily psychological constructs like “life satisfaction” aren’t a great fit. I think the discussions you’d want to look at for these more philosophical purposes are discussions around eudaimonia, hedonia, etc.
Huh, I feel like the same issue would arise for (e.g.) eudaimonia, if we tried to spec out what it is we mean exactly by “eudaimonia.”
(My model here is that the psychological constructs are an attempt at specifying + making quantifiable concepts that philosophy had identified but left vague.)
Ah, yeah. I didn’t mean to suggest that the philosophers have it all worked out. What I meant is that I think the philosophers seem to share your goals. In other words, I (as a non-professional in either psychology or philosophy) think if someone came up to a psychologist and said, “I’ve come up with these edge cases for ‘life satisfaction’”, they’d more or less reply, “That’s regrettable. Moving on...”. On the other hand, if someone came up to a philosopher and said, “I’ve come up with edge cases for ‘eudaimonia’”, they might reply, “Yes, edges cases like these are among my central concerns. Here’s the existing work on the matter and here are my current attempts at a resolution.”
Got it. I’m somewhat more bearish than you re: academic philosophers sharing my goals here. (Though some definitely do! Generalizations are hard.)