Types of subjective welfare

Interesting exploration.  I have some confusion, or maybe disagreement, about the classification.  The first three (hedonic, felt desires, and cognitive beliefs) are distinguishable, but not necessarily distinct.  They're so interrelated that they may simply be different views of the same thing.  Or they may be different focuses, but deeply influencing each other in ways that are hard to disentangle.  Felt desires, for instance, seem a lot like anticipation of hedonistic states, and belief-like preferences are a recursive modeling of the other two, in oneself and others.   

The last (Choices and behavior-revealed preferences) is, presumaby, a result of the other three, not a distinct kind of welfare.  Interestingly, it's the ONLY view that other people have of someone's internal state.  Especially if speech is noticed as an action, and the choice of whether and what to say is just another choice, from which we can infer a bit about internal states.

Thanks for the post. I’d like to propose another possible type of (or really, way of measuring) subjective welfare: self-esteem-influenced experience states. I believe having higher self-esteem generally translates to assigning more of our experiences as “positive.” For instance, someone with low self-esteem may hate exercise and deem the pain of it to be a highly negative experience. Someone with high self-esteem, on the other hand, may consider a particularly hard (painful) workout to be a “positive” experience as they focus on how it’s going to build their fitness to the next level and make them stronger.

Further, I believe that our self-esteem depends on to what degree we take responsibility for our emotions and actions - more responsibility translates to higher self-esteem (see “The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem” by Nathaniel Branden for thoughts along these lines). At low self-esteem levels, "experience states" basically translate directly to hedonic states, in that only pleasure and pain can seem to matter as "positive experiences" and "negative experiences" to a person with low self-esteem (the exception may be if someone's depressed, when not much at all seems to matter). At high self-esteems, hedonic states play a role in experience states, but they’re effectively seen through a lens of responsibility, such as the pain of exercise seen through the lens of one’s own responsibility for getting oneself in shape, and deciding to feel good emotionally about pushing through the physical pain (here we could perhaps be considered to be getting closer to belief-like preferences).