Is well-being the kind of thing that can be summed across individuals? This paper takes a measurement-theoretic approach to answering this question. To make sense of adding well-being, we would need to identify some natural ‘concatenation’ operation on the bearers of well-being that satisfies the axioms of extensive measurement and can therefore be represented by the arithmetic operation of addition. I explore various proposals along these lines, involving the concatenation of segments within lives over time, of entire lives led alongside one another or in sequence, and of evaluatively basic propositions via conjunction. All of these proposals turn out to carry highly controversial commitments about the good. I do not claim that these commitments are unacceptable. But they suggest that we cannot simply take for granted, as many philosophers do, that there is any such thing as the sum of well-being.

中文翻译：

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幸福的总和

幸福感是可以对个体进行总结的吗？本文采用测量理论方法来回答这个问题。为了理解幸福感的增加，我们需要识别幸福感承载者的一些自然“串联”运算，它满足广泛测量的公理，因此可以用加法算术运算来表示。我沿着这些思路探索各种建议，包括随着时间的推移将生命中的各个片段串联起来，将整个生命一起或按顺序进行，以及通过连接来评估基本命题。所有这些提议都带有极具争议性的善意承诺。我并不是说这些承诺是不可接受的。但他们表明，我们不能像许多哲学家那样简单地认为理所当然，