If a good life is one in which the good outweighs the bad by a certain amount, and if well-being were simply additive, then these two lives should be seen as equally desirable. But that is not how most people look at it. Given a choice, most people would prefer the life that takes the upward trend and we’d consider the person with that life the more fortunate. What Daniel Kahneman found about pleasure and pain—that people were willing to endure pain longer if the ending was relatively pleasant—was found in the narrow context of painful medical procedures, such as colonoscopies. Does this same
...more
