Abstract

A person's well‐being consists in his successful pursuit of valuable, willingly embraced goals. Many of these goals have a nested structure, and presuppose the existence of social forms or collective goods. Self‐interest is a narrower notion than that of personal well‐being. Self‐interest is advanced by fulfilment of a person's biologically determined needs and desires, including his feelings of satisfaction or contentment that arise from his pursuit of goals, which he was not biologically determined to have. Unlike the division between morality and self‐interest, there is no deep division between morality and personal well‐being.