Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well

What is human well-being? Valerie Tiberius argues that our lives go well to the extent that we succeed in terms of what matters to us emotionally, reflectively, and over the long term. In other words, well-being consists in fulfilling or realizing our appropriate values over time. In the first
half of this book, Tiberius sets out the theory of well-being as value fulfilment. She explains what valuing is and what it is to fulfill values over time. In the second half of the book she applies the theory to the problem of how to help others, particularly our friends. We don't always know how
to provide the help we know others need; but we also have the problem of knowing what help they need in the first place, and this is a problem that requires ethical thinking. Tiberius argues that when we want to help others achieve greater well-being, we should pay attention to their values. This
entails attending to how others' values fit together, how they understand what it means to succeed in terms of these values, and how things could change for them over time. Being a good and helpful friend, then, requires cultivating some habits of humility that overcome our tendency to think we know
what's good for other people without really understanding what it's like to be them.


Author: Valerie Tiberius
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 12/25/2018
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.40w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780198809494

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2019

About the Author

Valerie Tiberius, Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair, University of Minnesota

Valerie Tiberius is the Paul W. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Minnesota. Her work explores the ways in which philosophy and psychology can both contribute to the study of well-being and virtue. She is the author of The Reflective Life: Living Wisely With Our Limits (Oxford, 2008), and Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2015). She has also published numerous articles on the topics of virtue, well-being, and the relationship between positive psychology and ethics, and has received grants from the Templeton Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.