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ABSTRACT
Hedonic adaptation has come to play a large role in wellbeing studies and in practical philosophy more generally. We argue that hedonic adaptation has been too closely assimilated to sensory adaptation. Sensation and selective attention do indeed play a role in adaptation; but so do judgment, articulation, contextualization and background assumptions, as well as coping strategies and features of one’s social and physical environment. Hence the notion of hedonic adaptation covers not a single uniform phenomenon, but a whole range of different processes and mechanisms. We present a taxonomy of different forms of hedonic adaptation, pointing especially to the importance of coping strategies and socially supported adaptation, which have been overlooked or misdescribed by adaptation theory, but implicitly recognized by empirical research. We further argue that the differences between types adaptive processes have ramifications for normative theories. Adaptation can work both for good and for bad, depending on the psychological and contextual details. Acknowledging the many forms of hedonic adaptation, and the ubiquitous role of mutual adjustments of values, standards of judgment, emotional tendencies, behavior and environmental factors in achieving wellbeing also gives support to a more complex and dynamic view of wellbeing as such.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. We shall use the expressions ”happiness” and ”wellbeing” more or less interchangeably, as they often are in the empirical literature, where ”wellbeing” usually means subjective wellbeing. When it comes to discussing the philosophical implications for normative evaluation and theorizing about “the nature of wellbeing”, we may occasionally use “wellbeing” to refer to whatever is seen as ultimately good for a person, as it usually is in the philosophical literature.
2. Thus some might argue that our criticism is misguided, because the notion of hedonic adaptation is, per definition, restricted to affective responses to stimuli, while this does not rule out that there are other forms of “adaptation” relevant to wellbeing more generally. Yet the notion of hedonic adaptation is not normally understood in such a restricted sense. Rather it is used to describe – and explain – adaptation phenomena, i.e. adaptive changes in subjective wellbeing, much more generally (see e.g. Nettle, Citation2005, p. 75; Diener et al., Citation2006; Wikipedia contributors, Citation2019). While we could use an alternative expression like “wellbeing adaptation” to refer to the more generic phenomenon we are after, this would not be helpful.
3. From a philosophical point of view, however, the use of the expression “knowledge” is less fortunate, since it is normally taken to denote an epistemic, truth-involving relationship, whereas Lyubomirski probably intends it to mean merely a doxastic, and not necessarily veridical or properly warranted, mental state caused by the situation. Moreover, her talk of “recognition” seems to imply a kind of conceptual grasp or apprehension a situation, which is also an unduly restriction, as it rules out less cognitively laden types of subjective response
4. In fact, the hypothesis that the apparent adaptation is merely linguistic relabeling was put forward already as a critical response to the adaptation-level theory of Helson; see e.g. (Krantz & Campbell, Citation1961). It was vehemently rejected by Helson himself (Helson, Citation1971).
5. This was suggested by a very perceptive reviewer
6. A similar point has been frequently made in animal ethics, where it is standardly assumed that human pain and misery is more harmful than that of animals, because of the ability of humans to realize and reflect on their sorry state or unpleasant experiences
7. Compare this with Darwall’s (Citation2002) definition of wellbeing as that which we ultimately care for when we care for a person
8. While the semantics and pragmatics of the coordinating conjunction ”but” is a controversial issue, it seems rather obvious that in the example it has the function of contrasting (D. Umbach, Citation2004; C. Umbach, Citation2005), while also exhibiting elements of concession (Grote et al., Citation1997). Even if when it is used without any semantic intention, just as a pausing sound or expression of hesitation, “but” is still an indicator of calibration; by pausing or hesitating, the speaker avoids making a completely spontaneous judgment and adopts a slightly more reflexive stance (in pragmatics, “but” is seen as an indication of a higher-order speech-act; see Huang Citation2012, 135).
9. It may be less straightforward to assess whether a person “would been have better off without the disability” than we assume here. As pointed out by a reviewer, it gives rise to one of the infamously tricky ‘non-identity’ problems (Parfit, Citation1984), since it is arguably unclear who would, in a counterfactual situation, be benefitted by not having a disability. This actually reinforces the point that a person may identify with a disability and use this identification to understand her condition as not harmful, because the comparison is not relevant; a person without the disability would not be her. This may be compatible with viewing disability as relatively harmful from a population or public health perspective, and something to be prevented, assuming that such preventive measures need not be ‘person-affecting’. McMahan (Citation2013) has defended a view that allows for recognition of both comparative and non-comparative concerns.
10. Mechanisms like these have, for example, been identified in recent studies of identity-building among autists (some of whom, characteristically, prefer being described thusly, rather than as ‘people with autism’). See e.g. (Cooper et al., Citation2021).
11. In their study of adaptation in chronically ill and disabled patients, Menzel et al. (Citation2002) also point to mechanisms that are not internal to the patients’ psychology.
12. As for example, Menzel et al. (Citation2002) argued that different types of adaptation in chronically ill patients could have different normative significance
13. We do not argue that the processes of hedonic adaptation, as we have described them, are incompatible with more standard views of wellbeing. Proponents of such views may say that the conditioning in question is merely causal and not constitutive. But maintaining a very strict distinction between causal and constitutive factors in wellbeing may be difficult, and in any case unproductive, if one also wants one’s theory of well-being to be illuminatingly applicable to real-life cases (Alexandrova, Citation2017). Besides, even though it needs independent justification, a hybrid and holistic theory of the sort proposed here seems to match the characterization of the adaptation processes exceptionally well.
14. For a formalized definition, and further specification, of separability, see Bader (Citation2016). See also Broome (Citation1991) for a similar notion. Raibley’s (Citation2012) understanding of holism is different, as he takes it to imply that momentary wellbeing and wellbeing over time are different thing (as does Velleman, Citation1991), whereas our proposal allows for wellbeing over time to be calculated from the totality of factors and their interaction. But see further below on how our findings may also lend support to a pluralist, contextualist view of wellbeing.
15. Hybridism, holism and contextualism are all independent views. It is possible, indeed the standard of ‘default’ position, to be a hybridist and/or a holist while maintaining a unitary, ‘invariantist’ view of wellbeing (taking it ‘wellbeing’ to denote a single, albeit multiply realizable and complexly structured, property, in all contexts). However, the fact that apparently identical cases of hedonic adaptation may elicit different normative judgments that do not seem to reflect (merely or mainly) different normative standpoints may lend support to contextualism.
16. A similar observation was made by Velleman (Citation1991), who suggested that we have both a synchronic or moment-based and a diachronic notion of wellbeing. Schramme’s (Citation2018) distinction between comparative and absolute harm also points toward a kind of contextualism, since it implies that one and the same condition (e.g. a certain disability) may be judged both harmful and unproblematic, depending on the context of evaluation. Fletcher (Citation2019) has recently argued that the apparent evidence for radical contextualism is not compelling and only supports the more moderate view that in different contexts, we are interested in different aspects of wellbeing and set different thresholds for doing well. The latter view, however, seems to us already significantly contextualist (it is, for example, not less contextualist than typical contextualism about knowledge ascriptions), and we do not take our analysis of hedonic adaptation to support anything stronger.
17. Enoch (Citation2020) argues, on liberalist grounds, that adaptative preferences are normatively problematic if they are not formed sufficiently autonomously, but also points out, in accordance with our view, that it is going to be “potentially controversial, for each purported adaptive preference case, whether is [in fact] one” (Enoch, Citation2020, p. 172).
18. Interestingly, already Nozick (Citation1989, pp. 114 f.) noticed – implicitly – that a person’s particular ‘style’ of a adaptation (i.e. ‘shifting baselines’) matters for whether we consider it good for the person or not.