TY  - UNPB
KW  - School adjustment
KW  - Freedom
KW  - Moral development
KW  - Moral behaviour
KW  - Philosophy of action
KW  - Sociology of education
KW  - Individual differences
TI  - Freedom, well-being and schooling: beyond desire-satisfaction.
UR  - https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10021531/
AV  - public
EP  - 260
N1  - Unpublished
ID  - discovery10021531
M1  - Doctoral
PB  - Institute of Education, University of London
Y1  - 1994///
A1  - Marples, Roger.
N2  - Schools have an undeniably crucial role in influencing the ways in which well-being
is perceived. They are also instrumental in promoting or frustrating opportunities
whereby people may come to appreciate the significance of alternative courses of
action as well as providing an understanding of ways in which these might be
pursued. It is thus incumbent upon teachers to appreciate the nature of freedom and
its place within an overall theory of personal well-being. This thesis is meant to
contribute to a clarification of some of the complexities involved.
Its aim is twofold. Firstly, it attempts to refute accounts of freedom and personal
well-being which rely on desire-satisfaction as a criterion of rational choice. Such
accounts are shown to be defective in that they are ultimately subjective and result in
consequences which are at once paradoxical and disturbing.
The value we attach to freedom - as something having as much to do with the
capacity to choose from a range of significant alternatives as being unencumbered by
constraints - is in virtue of its importance in the kind of life appropriate for persons,
namely that which is compatible with flourishing or personal well-being. If there
were no more to freedom than the removal of relevant constraints it is difficult to see
why we should attach such importance to its promotion and preservation. Alternative
possibilities are identified in a variety of ways but their criteria of significance are a
function of something altogether less subjective than the fact that they are desired.
Desire-satisfaction accounts of freedom and well-being derive their support from a
familiar and widely held position within philosophical psychology in spite of the fact
that it is based on little more than Humean dogma. It grants logical priority to desire
over value and is thus unable to account for human interests and well-being in
anything other than subjective terms.
It is the second principal task of the thesis to reverse this order of priority and
thereby to account for well-being by reference to a conception of human nature based
on real-interests, the absence of which are likely to result in persons being harmed. If it succeeds in this it is possible to conceive of well-being in more objective terms
while at the same time accommodating widely differing conceptions of flourishing in
accordance with individual and freely chosen lives.
Compulsory schooling is seen to merit justification largely in terms of the extent to
which it succeeds in promoting the freedom and well-being of those destined for
citizenship in a democracy.
ER  -