Are Psychologically Rich Lives Good Lives?

Abstract

Recent experimental findings suggest that a life full of interesting, challenging, and emotionally heightened experiences—what psychologists now refer to as psychologically rich experiences—is valued, not for the happiness it produces (if any) or the sense of meaning it might bestow on our lives, but for its own sake. A psychologically rich life is, as Besser, L., & Oishi, S. (2020). The psychologically rich life. Philosophical Psychology, 33, 1053–1071.) argue, “valuable and choice-worthy on its own,” independent of its relations to other conceptions of prudential value. The hypothesis then represents an implicit challenge to traditional conceptions of well-being, like hedonism, desire satisfaction theory, and even some forms of objective list theory, since such theories deny that psychological richness is “fundamentally” valuable. Since the authors ground their hypothesis on the empirical data, it should be the case that the data indicate that respondents deny that the value they assign to psychological richness rests on its relation to all plausible conceptions of well-being. The data, I argue, do not show this. Moreover, the term ‘experience’—as it figures in the experimental design—is ambiguous. Consequently, we cannot (yet) determine if the objects of respondents’ judgments refer to their psychological reactions to events or the events themselves.