In a recent book, Wayne Sumner gives a lucid and very thorough treatment of the standard accounts of well-being. While his criticisms of hedonism and objectivism are convincing, his objections to preferentialism are less so. He argues that preferentialism is seriously mistaken, for preference satisfaction is neither sufficient nor necessary for well-being. In this paper, I show that Sumner’s arguments do not support this conclusion. In particular, I show that some of his main criticisms are based on a straw man conception of well-being preferentialism. I discuss this conception in the second section of this paper. In the third section, I deal with his criticism of the sufficiency claim. I show that his criticisms can be met by adopting a personal restriction that excludes preferences that do not involve the preferrer and his life. Finally, in the fourth section, I turn to his criticism of the necessity claim.
