People have a set of attentional policies — things like “while driving, watch the road”, “when talking to someone I care about, look deep inside myself and try to be as honest as possible”, “when writing creatively, follow impulses”. Each of these attentional policies is adopted for reasons. E.g., “watch the road, so you don't crash.”
But, looking at the reasons, we find there are two types.
It’s easy to name a change of conditions under which you’d no longer need to watch the road: self-driving, for instance. It’s harder to say which conditions would mean you don’t need to look deeply inside yourself.
Another way to say it is the latter set is “constitutive” of a way of living. They are in the core of what we want to be paying attention to, as part of our best life, rather than being in some periphery, where we attend to them only in certain circumstances and for a known reason.
In other words, you can sort of draw a circle around some core set of mutually supportive attentional policies, and call this mutually reinforcing set of policies—each of which has broad, difficult to enumerate benefits—you can call this “a person's conception of the good life”.
If you want to serve someone, help them attend to what’s in their core.
But there’s a final complication: as we get wiser, we upgrade our conception of the good life. There's a lot of similarity between how different people—even in different cultures—update their conception of the good life, as they do moral and aesthetic learning. To some extent, you can predict it.
So this leaves us with a question: should someone's current conception of the good life be taken as the final word about how to serve them? Or should we anticipate these upgrades to their core?