Ill-Being: Philosophical Perspectives

Nearly all of us aspire to live a prudentially good life.To achieve this, we must understand which things are good for us and which things are bad for us - in other words, we must understand what well-being and ill-being consist in.While well-being has been the subject of significant philosophical inquiry, ill-being has received far less attention.The handful of philosophers who have considered ill-being have challenged the common belief that ill-being is the symmetrical counterpart of well-being and argued that deriving accounts of ill-being from existing theories of well-being is more complex than it appears.The present collection of fifteen original essays offers an in-depth exploration of the philosophical issues surrounding ill-being.Issues covered include the role of ill-being in everyday practice, the aggregation of goods and bads, degrees of well- and ill-being, how existing theories of well-being can account for ill-being, the role of adaptive preferences in ill-being, and how