Are Adaptive Preferences a Problem for Subjective Theories of Well-Being?
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Chris Heathwood, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder — An adaptive preference is one formed or changed in response to what the subject of the preference takes their feasible options to be. The problem of adaptive preferences for some theory of well-being is that the theory appears to generate an intuitively mistaken result about one or more cases of adaptive preference. Against conventional wisdom, I argue that the problem of adaptive preference is not much of a problem for subjective approaches to well-being; and the only subjective theories that it is a problem for are the least plausible versions of subjectivism anyway. This can be shown if we are careful to attend to three crucial distinctions within subjective theories of well-being that most writers on adaptive preference appear insensitive to.
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UNLV Dept. of Philosophy