ABSTRACT
Well-being, as I intend it, is prudential value in the most general sense. A person who has well-being is living a life that is going well for her; she has achieved her own good. People with different ethical theories will find well-being important for different reasons — consequentialists take it to be the good that ought to be promoted, deontologists take it to be the target of duties of beneficence, and some virtue ethicists take it to be the organizing principle of ethics — but no one denies that it is important in some way or other. It would be a good thing, then, to know what well-being is. Unfortunately, though, there has been disagreement about the nature of well-being since philosophers have roamed the earth, and those disagreements have not changed much.
