 Subjective accounts of well-being, hedonic and simple-desire accounts, appear easier to apply to people with such impairments, for two reasons. First, joy, pain, satisfaction, and frustration are more readily conveyed and assessed than the more complex mental states that informed-desire and objective list theories take into account. Second, people with cognitive impairments appear less capable of enjoying or attaining some items on standard objective lists: not merely various forms of achievement, but also a variety of social relationships and aesthetic experiences. More broadly, persons with cognitive impairments may be unable to form and pursue a conception of the good life. The conviction that persons with severe cognitive impairments can and often do enjoy relatively high levels of well-being thus seems to favor a more subjective account of well-being than that adopted for everyone else.