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advancement or prospects for what we might normally associate with factors contributing to wellbeing. Nevertheless, if asked, our slave might report that her life is just fine. In fact, she may claim that she enjoys a high degree of wellbeing. Our intuitions seem to be at variance with her subjective judgment about how her life is going; while she may report satisfaction with her life, we recognize immediately that something is amiss. Intuitively, we see that oppression and slavery
reduce
quality of life.
     
    What the aptly named Happy Slave example supposedly shows is that in order to make sense of these judgments, we must draw a distinction between subjective quality of life (or wellbeing) and objective quality of life.The subjective sort simply depends on the perspectives, preferences, desires, or whatever, of a person (consonant with our position outlined above), but the objective judgment that the slave’s life
is
worse off, despite her subjective mind states, requires some external, objective understanding of wellbeing.Thus, wellbeing does not simply
amount to
whatever we like or find worthwhile – something else matters, too. If this is true, then one may be mistaken about whether one actually enjoys a meaningful level of wellbeing.
     
    We can replace the “happy slave” with the “happy porn star” and we get essentially the question that is the target of our essay. Why isn’t the porn star simply
wrong
about her quality of life? It may
seem to her
as if her life is a good one, but
in fact
it is not.To establish our claim that being a porn star does not necessarily diminish one’s wellbeing, then, requires our dealing with the Happy Slave problem.
     
    Fortunately, others working in the context of medical ethics have blazed a trail for us to follow. Ron Amundson, in defense of the plausibility of subjective accounts of wellbeing, argues against the intuitions “shown” by the Happy Slave problem by pointing out some epistemological problems.We seem to have an upper hand in understanding the slave’s plight because we are third-person observers, that is, outsiders, who recognize the objectification, coercion, and so forth. And we think “if only the slave knew what was good for her, she would recognize how horrible her life really is.” That may be true, Amundson concedes, but that special standpoint does not generalize beyond
obvious
cases like slavery. There are many cases in which third-personal knowledge of a person’s situation does not yield grounds for accurate judgments about another person’s welfare. Amundson points out that precisely the opposite is true with respect to physical disability. A curious fact about quality of life reports from disabled people is that they tend to be about the same, or sometimes even better, than those of “normal” people. That is, their subjective quality of life does not differ on the basis of physical limitations, despite the fact that our “intuitions” tell us that such a life is worse than normal. Who is really in the right position to make the judgment that disability decreases quality of life: a disabled person or an outsider? The answer seems clear – the person who has endured the disability knows better the quality of her life than those of us who have not “walked a mile in her shoes.” Furthermore, Amundson argues, unless we have a robust understanding of what “objective” quality of life consists in, we have no way of telling whether our judgments about the wellbeing of the disabled are legitimate, or the result of social stigmas. 5
     
    One could apply the same response, changing what needs to be changed, to the case of the porn star. Is it more like the plight of the slave, or the plight of the disabled? What are the “objective” factors that determine our wellbeing? Do our judgments about the quality of porn star lives simply reflect a social stigma? We are inclined to think the latter is true. Are there objective factors that