Life's values : pleasures, happiness, well-being and meaning Alan H Goldman

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Life's Values: Pleasure, Happiness, Well-Being, and Meaning; Copyright; Dedication; Acknowledgments; Contents; Introduction; Pleasure; Musical Prelude; Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni; Complexities; Preview; The Nature and Types of Pleasure; Sensations; Intentional pleasure; Pure feeling pleasure; Are pleasures and pains opposites?; Pleasure and Motivation; Psychological hedonism; Pleasure and desire; Sources of pleasure; Pleasure and Sex; The concept of sex; Evolution and sexual pleasure; Culture and sex; The Value of Pleasure; Ethical hedonism; The value of sensory pleasure
The value of intentional pleasureSummary; Happiness; Preview; Opposing Views; Feelings; Judgments; Emotions; Psychologists' concept; Related states; The philosophical analysis; Happiness; Categorized as an emotion; The judgmental component; Other components; Happiness and Well-Being; Nonequivalence; Preview of well-being; Relation of happiness to well-being; Relation to Other Emotions; Parallels; Borderline cases; Summary; Well-Being; Criteria for Theory Choice; Other Accounts; Hedonism; Objective lists; Perfectionism; Other accounts: causal networks; Desire Satisfaction; Self-interest
Rationality and depthFurther limitations; Surprises and counterfactual desires; Objections; Desire satisfaction?; Reasons and normativity; Objectionable desires; Necessary desires; Moral and prudential calculation; Children and couch potatoes; Meaning in Life; Preview; Senses and Non-Senses of "Meaning"; Objectively valuable pursuits and importance; Bearers of meaning; The Meaning (or Lack of It) of Life; Grand myths; The cosmic perspective; Loss of faith; Meaning in Life; The meaning of events; Narratives; Selves; Paradigms of Meaningful and Meaningless Lives; Repetition; Incoherence
Meaning and valueSources of Meaning; Long-term goals; Success; Advice ; Interpretations; Nature of interpretation; Constraints; The Value of Meaning in Life; Individual differences; The context of the question; Objective Value; The concept; Relation to meaning and action; Summary; Conclusions; Appendix: Desires; Review of Criteria; My Account; The cluster concept; The Reductionist Account; Rewards; Natural Kinds and Functions; Sufficiency; Explanatory Power; Contingency; The cognitive element; Neurophysical Reduction; Incompleteness; Relations to other mental states
Need we reduce in order to preserve?Concluding Remarks; Bibliography; Index

In Life's Values Alan H. Goldman seeks to explain what is of ultimate value in individual lives. The proposed candidates include pleasure, happiness, meaning, and well-being. Only the latter is the all-inclusive category of personal value, and it consists in the satisfaction of deep rational desires. Since individuals' rational desires differ, the book cannot dictate what will maximize your own well-being and what in particular you ought to pursue. However it can tell you to make your desires rational (that is, informed and coherent) and it can also explain the nature of these states that typically enter into well-being: pleasure, happiness, and meaning being typically partial causes as well as effects of well-being. All are by-products of satisfying rational desires and rarely successfully aimed at directly. Pleasure comes in sensory, intentional, and pure feeling forms, each with an opposite in pain or distress. Happiness in its primary sense is an emotion, not a constant state as some philosophers assume, and in secondary senses a mood (disposition to have an emotion) or temperament (disposition to be in a mood). Meaning in life is a matter of events in one's life fitting into intelligible narratives. Events in narratives are understood teleologically as well as causally, in terms of outcomes aimed at as well antecedent events. So, in the briefest terms, this book distinguishes and relates pleasure, happiness, well-being, and meaning, and relates each to motivation and value