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

Jul 6, 2026

Well-Being as Value Fulfillment examines well-being as something that is bound to values and to the practices through which people support one another in living well. Building on earlier work that contrasted well-being with living a good life from an individual perspective, the book shifts attention toward assessing others’ well-being while preserving the closeness between a person and their own well-being. The author integrates insights from philosophers and psychologists while emphasizing a theoretical approach informed by empirical research, and highlights how friends can cultivate qualities that make mutual help possible.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryHealthcare

FormatPDF

Pages227

Reading Time9 h 32 min

Preface

Origins of the book’s focus

Audience and interdisciplinary aims

Scope and research orientation

Well-Being as Value Fulﬁllment Well-Being as Value Fulﬁllment How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well Valerie Tiberius 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Valerie Tiberius 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression:1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951518 ISBN 978–0–19–880949–4 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. To my parents, Merike Lugus and Richard Tiberius Preface I have been thinking about well-being for many years. I started to want to write this book when I realized that my last book (The Reﬂective Life) was not exactly about well-being, even though that’s what I thought it would be about when I started writing it. In that book I ended up distinguishing the topic of well-being from my topic there: what it is to live a good life from your own point of view. I am now extending some ofthe ideas that I developed in previous work to the topic of well-being. In order to do this, I have had to move away from the ﬁrst person point of view and talk about how we assess the well-being of others. My aim here has been to do this without sacriﬁcing the intimate relationship between well-being and the person whose well-being it is. This new focus has allowed me to move from questions about how to live one’s own life to questions about how to help other people. How friends can help each other and what kinds of qualities it makes sense for friends to cultivate in order to be helpful are topics that I take up in the second half of the book. My thinking about the topic of well-being has been greatly inﬂuenced by the work of psychologists on well-being and happiness. I appreciate this work and the contribution these researchers are making to the ﬁeld and to society. I ﬁrmly believe that questions about the nature of well-being and how to improve people’s lives are questions that can only be answered by putting together the contributions from different ﬁelds. For these reasons, I did not write this book only for philosophers; rather, I set out to write a book that has something to say to psychologists and philosophers. Indeed, I hope that any person with an interest in the topic will be able to get something out of the book, but that may represent too much optimism about my skills as a writer. Writing for a broader audience (or at least attempting to) may result in a ﬁnal product that disappoints everyone in different ways. viii PREFACE There is a lot less discussion of the literature and of particular objections than philosophers will expect, and not much engagement with the method of counter-exampling beloved by p

FAQs

What is the book’s central aim regarding well-being?

It explains well-being as a form of value fulfillment and explores how we can help each other live well, including how to assess others’ well-being without losing its intimate link to the person themselves.

How does the author’s approach differ from earlier work?

The author extends ideas from a previous book by moving away from first-person questions about how to live one’s own life toward questions about how to help other people.

What informs the book, and how is it positioned relative to psychology research?

The book draws on psychological research on well-being and happiness but is primarily theoretical, informed by empirical findings rather than focused on reporting psychological experiments or extensive literature debates.

Jul 6, 2026

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