Ill-Being and Fitting Unhappiness

Abstract This chapter extends the author’s account of well-being as fitting happiness to ill-being by arguing that ill-being consists in fitting unhappiness, and responds to an important objection that this extension faces. This account of ill-being can be seen as the combination of three claims. The first is that unhappiness consists in a negative balance of emotions, moods, and sensory pleasures and displeasures. The second is that these states are affective experiences of value, which can be assessed as fitting or unfitting. The third claim is that ill-being consists in fitting unhappiness thus conceived. Combining all three claims, our account holds that ill-being consists in a fitting affective experience of the bad. The objection that this account faces is that it seems to imply that if unhappiness is wholly unfitting, then an individual’s life does not go badly for them when they are unhappy. This is counterintuitive. Unhappiness has a negative phenomenology, and its negative phenomenology seems to make unhappiness bad for the individual experiencing it even when their unhappiness is otherwise unfitting. This chapter examines various possible replies to this objection. Noticing its similarity with the ‘shooting-the-messenger’ objection against evaluativist accounts of unpleasant pain in philosophy of mind, it argues that the best strategy to address the ‘shooting-the-messenger’ objection can be adapted and redeployed to address the objection against the proposed account of ill-being.