Date: Wednesday 14th October 2026

Time: 18:00-20:00

Venue: River Room, King's Building, Strand Campus, London WC2R 2LS 

Title:

Unwelcome Welfare Goods

Abstract:

One of the most widely endorsed theses in contemporary philosophy of well-being is the idea that for something to be a welfare good – something that is basically or in itself or non-instrumentally good for a subject – there must be a relation of fit or suitability between the putative good and the subject. The most common account of fit appeals to the subject’s endorsement of the good: intrinsically desiring, valuing, or taking pleasure in it. Building on an argument by Richard Arneson, I argue that this putative Endorsement Constraint is mistaken. Instead, we should understand the notion of fit in terms of self-realization, or serving the coherent and successful functioning of our responsive capacities, such as reason, imagination, and sensibility.

Speaker Bio: 

Antti Kauppinen is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. He has written on a broad range of issues in ethics and related disciplines, including well-being, meaningfulness, moral sentimentalism, and the relationship between practical and epistemic normativity.