Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life

A Transformative Vision for Human Well-Being

Garrett Thomson, Scherto Gill, Ivor Goodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429875250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica nell'arte e nelle discipline umanistiche

Well-being studies is an exciting and relatively new multi-disciplinary field, with data being gathered from different domains in order to improve social policies. In its reliance on a truncated account of well-being based implicitly on neoclassical economic assumptions, however, the field is deeply flawed. Departing from reductive accounts of well-being that exclude the normative or evaluative aspect of the concept and so impoverish the attendant conception of human life, this book offers a new perspective on what counts normatively as being well. In reconceptualising well-being holistically, it presents a fresh vista on how we can consider the meanings of human life in a manner that also serves as a source of constructive social critique. The book thus undertakes to invert the usual approach to the social sciences, in which the research is required to be objective in terms of methodology and subjective with regard to evaluative claims. Instead, the authors are deliberately objective about values in order to be more open to the subjectivities of human life. Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life thus seeks to move away from economic considerations' domination of all social spaces in order to understand the possibilities of well-being beyond instrumentalisation or commodification. A radical new approach to the human well-being, this book will appeal to philosophers, social theorists and political scientists and all who are interested in human happiness.

1
Preliminaries for a framework

This first chapter is a bit like setting the table for the dinner to come: a necessary preparation for the meal that is on the stove. But it isn’t the same as eating. Nevertheless, the chapter is immensely important in defining the framework, agenda and direction of our later discussions. We wish that our readers might glance it over again after having completed the whole book because its agenda-setting nature is most apparent at the end. This chapter may be the most important in the book. It is like a backroom strategic planning discussion prior to the board meeting.

The fundamental tension that drives this chapter concerns evaluative claims. On the one hand, as we shall see, evaluative claims can be true or false, and they are so in virtue of some criteria that are empirically specifiable. On the other hand, we will reject theories that reduce well-being to empirical concepts such as preference, pleasure and self-reported happiness. Such reductive accounts fail to capture the multi-dimensionality and richness that well-being has as an evaluative concept. The tension between these views needs resolution.

Some misconceptions

This tension is set in the following context. While the idea of basing social policies on well-being and happiness is very welcome, currently, the new field of well-being studies thwarts a golden opportunity to transcend the severe limitations of society’s understanding of value. We can break out of current misapprehensions of value that plague our lives and society, which we will document in this book. It is a pity to repeat those misunderstandings within the study of well-being. Here is why.

It is important for the critique and re-envisaging of society. Increasingly, governments determine social policies using well-being and happiness indicators; increasingly, social progress and development are being defined in such terms. Such changes make sense. Well-being indicators are more responsive to what matters than purely economic ones. They pick out more directly what matters more directly. If money and economic factors are valuable only as a means to well-being, then our policies and interventions should track changes in well-being. This more direct approach is especially welcome given two factors. First, there is increasing awareness of the importance of the diminishing marginal utility of income. As we grow richer, after a point, money matters less (Easterlin 1974; Easterlin, McVey, Switek, Sawangfa and Zweig 2010). Second, because environmental concerns are pressing, there is a cry to be more efficient in the ‘production of well-being’; that is, to not squander precious natural resources for little or no gain in well-being, and not to ruin our natural environment for minimal gains in utility. Thus, the shift towards economies of well-being is exciting and promising on several counts.

Nevertheless, there is also a danger lurking here. The shift from policies based on neoclassical economics towards those founded on well-being could be a truly liberating transformation. However, the opportunity for radical social improvement might be lost, depending on how we understand ‘well-being’. The more we employ implicitly economic ideas to understand the core of human well-being, the more we squander the opportunity for radical transformation. Our understanding of well-being will merely echo the values accepted by society rather than being a way to critique them. This is not only a missed opportunity, but also a profound misapprehension. Whilst economic thought is vitally necessary to evaluate the means to well-being, for instance, to assess efficiency and to weigh costs and benefits, standard economic concepts are inadequate to articulate the core nature of human well-being. Well-being itself is not an economic notion even though the means to well-being includes those that are economic. The more we understand well-being in human and evaluative terms, the more liberating the shift towards well-being based policies will be. The book will make these ideas clear and vivid. To begin, we will argue that there are four erroneous tendencies concerning the study of well-being.

1) Empirical and evaluative

In the social sciences, writers tend not to distinguish well between empirical and evaluative claims. Put simply, empirical statements describe what is, and evaluations tell us what ought to happen and what is better or worse. The social sciences are concerned exclusively with empirical facts about social groups, and often only with measurable ones. Evaluative questions about what is good or bad do not fit into such a framework (Hollis 2015).¹ Because of this, scientists tend to reduce claims about what is valuable to assertions about what someone considers valuable or what someone values. This is because the latter are empirical facts about a person or group, which in principle can be measured.² Supposedly, in contrast, what is valuable seemingly isn’t an empirical fact, at least in a straightforward way. Therefore, according to the empirical social sciences, it must be understood in terms of what someone values.

Although this reductive error is understandable, it remains a mistake. What is important for a person’s life cannot be reduced to what she thinks is so. Nor can it be reduced to what she values.³ The fact that someone values something or has a positive attitude towards it doesn’t ipso facto render it valuable. Nor is it necessary.

The question of what is valuable might be outside the proper province of the social sciences, but this does not mean that such evaluative questions can be avoided. We cannot ignore the evaluative nature of the concept of well-being because that is what the concept is for: a multifaceted kind of evaluation. ‘Well-being’ is roughly equivalent to ‘being and living well’ and ‘well’ is equivalent to ‘in a good way’. ‘Well-being’ requires ‘goodness’; it is an ineluctably normative concept.

We have found that there is resistance to and misunderstanding of this point. Many define happiness in terms of what a person values.⁴ This ties a person’s happiness conceptually to the values that she accepts or ‘has’.⁵ In opposition to this, there is the possibility that a person might have values that are not at all conducive to her happiness or which don’t constitute it. The person may value the wrong kinds of things (Badhwar 2014: 222). What a person values doesn’t necessarily track what is valuable as part of her well-being. In this regard, we are fallible; we can make mistakes and be ignorant. This implies that we cannot define well-being in terms of what a person values.⁶ This is a result of fundamental importance.

Traditionally, well-being has been understood either in terms of feelings of happiness or the satisfaction of desires. These perspectives accord with popular understandings and with common sense. This means that they are most likely not entirely wrong, and that they contain important insights, which we shall need to unearth. Nevertheless, we shall also argue that these two views are mistaken. Some contemporary psychological studies of well-being rely on these ideas, and we shall argue that this comprises a significant limitation of those empirical studies.

One aim of the book is to show why these reductive or thin accounts fail. We can already discern the evaluative nature of the quest from the question ‘How should one evaluate one’s life?’ We aren’t asking ‘How do people evaluate their lives?’ but rather how they ought to. The enterprise is essentially evaluative. It concerns how we ought to live or be, albeit that the ‘ought’ is non-moral. This facet of the question already indicates that the answer is normative.⁷

Consequently, our study is already meant to exclude thin as opposed to thick or value-rich conceptions of well-being. Thin conceptions try to avoid evaluative concepts, whereas, in contrast, rich conceptions employ value concepts. In short, well-being is not simply a question of happiness or of getting more of what one wants or having more pleasure. It cannot be reduced to evaluatively thin concepts such as happiness, desire and pleasure.

Claims made with thick evaluative concepts face the challenge of how they relate to empirical facts. This challenge is especially acute for the notion of well-being: if someone’s well-being has improved, this must be in virtue of some other facts about her life. We require some empirical criteria for what constitutes well-being. If the concept of well-being is evaluatively rich, then how can we determine empirically what well-being is? Furthermore, how can we make such an evaluative concept operational and quantitatively measurable? How can we make such a concept useful for social policy? Many social scientists ignore or evade the normative dimensions of the concept of well-being in part because they assume that such questions cannot be answered adequately within the framework of a rich theory. Nevertheless, in this book, we embrace these questions. The systematic study of human well-being requires that empirical investigations are directed towards the composition of well-being, as opposed to merely its causes and conditions. This requires a conceptual framework for understanding this composition. In this work, we will show how this requirement can be satisfied without embracing the standard happiness, desire and pleasure theories of well-being.

2) Instrumental and non-instrumental

The second systematic engrained error about the nature of value concerns the distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental values. Society abounds with mundane examples of the failure to draw this distinction because people tend to explain the value of anything in purely instrumental terms, even when this contains a patent absurdity. For example, consider the claim that happiness is good because happy people are more productive. True: it makes us so. True: this adds to the value of happiness. Nevertheless, it is a grossly misleading claim insofar as it ignores the point that ultimately productivity is only valuable instrumentally as a means to happiness. The original claim suggests that happiness is valuable because it makes us productive, and in this way, it puts the cart before the horse. For the moment, suffice it to say that inappropriate instrumentalisation is a systematic evaluative error in society. The basic distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental values is important for our theory in several ways. However, we will save the deeper significance of the distinction for Chapter 2. That is something to look forward to!

First, in conversation, people typically switch from talking about well-being to what causes a sense of or feelings of well-being. This shift is in danger of confusing happiness and well-being, which we need to separate. It also threatens to conflate well-being with a person’s perception of it, which again are distinct. More important, though, we need to separate two types of questions. ‘What typically causes or contributes to X?’ is distinct from ‘What does X consist in?’ For example, asking what kinds of things causally contribute to good health is different from seeking the definition of good health itself. Similarly, ‘What causes harm?’ is different from ‘What does harm consist in?’ We are concerned with the question ‘What does well-being consist in?’ which is different from and prior to ‘What sort of things causally contribute to well-being?’ There is a systematic tendency to ignore the former question by replacing it with the second. For example, ‘What role does friendship play in well-being?’ becomes wholly assimilated by the question ‘How does friendship contribute to our sense of well-being?’ (Graham 2011: 122). The constitutive question has been ignored, in lieu of the causal one. Both kinds of question are important, that is, both empirical causal studies and a better understanding of what constitutes well-being.

Second, we need to distinguish instrumental and non-instrumental values in our thinking about self-interest. It is obviously in our individual self-interest to earn more money, all other things being equal. Ceteris paribus, it is to our benefit and in our self-interest to acquire means of purely instrumental value, and harmful to lose and waste them. However, the idea of obtaining such benefits does not take us beyond instrumental value, which is purely derivative, and because of this an explanation of well-being cannot be couched entirely in such terms. Thus, the idea that well-being consists in acquiring more benefits is mistaken. It is erroneous even if it were true that such benefits always contribute to well-being. It is flawed as an account of well-being because such a theory must specify the kinds of non-instrumental values that constitute well-being.

To underline the point, notice that the above conditions may not hold. Benefits don’t always contribute towards well-being. For instance, a very depressed person, who acquires many instrumental benefits or goods, which she cannot use or appreciate, may not actually live a better life. Possessing or owning is a material relationship that does not suffice for the appreciation of value, which may require a change in the person. Merely having a benefit needn’t be sufficient for the living of a valuable process.

This important point may become lost easily by the already-mentioned failure to draw a simple distinction. The acquiring of such benefits may lead to a better life, but it does not constitute such a life. Likewise, losing wealth may cause us harm, but it does not constitute harm. In other words, we must distinguish what leads to or facilitates well-being and what this consists in. This point also applies to allied concepts such as happiness, welfare and quality of life; in each case, constitution and cause are distinct. To understand well-being, it is necessary to first elucidate what it is, which is in part a conceptual or philosophical exercise, rather than to start by trying to discover what causes or facilitates it, which is an empirical investigation. If we are not clear what it is, then we cannot determine what causes it.

What constitutes well-being is only partly a conceptual question. The relevant concepts will provide the framework, the types of distinctions and classifications that we need to investigate human well-being empirically. So, we need a conceptual framework for an account of well-being. But such a framework needs to be filled by empirical studies that show us what well-being consists in. In other words, empirical research shouldn’t be solely directed towards the causes of well-being. They should also help us understand its nature.

We can have a preliminary taste of the importance of the distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental values by considering the value of work. It is a well-known limit of purely economic analyses of work that they treat it purely instrumentally as a means of production and of personal income (Elster 1989; Ventegodt and Merrick 2009; White 1998). Given this, we might widen our conception of the value of work by looking at other non-financial utilities. One might ask: ‘What other measurable benefits does work bring us?’ The point is that even this improved conception of the value of work doesn’t frame all the issues in the right way. It still makes work only a production or only instrumentally valuable. And while work is a production, it is also much more than that. It is also a lived experience and a self-conception. In other words, work has non-instrumental value. But what does its being valuable non-instrumentally consist in? Such values cannot be reduced to what people like or enjoy or value in their work.⁸ This is because we can make mistakes and be ignorant. There may be aspects of work that we enjoy that are inherently contrary to our well-being, and there may be aspects of work that we fail to properly appreciate. In other words, we have an interesting theoretical problem of significance: how should we identify or specify the relevant non-instrumentally valuable aspects of work?

We need to answer the above question to be able to combine the productive and human asp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Preliminaries for a framework
• 2 Beyond instrumentalisation
• 3 Activities and desires
• 4 Awareness
• 5 Relationships
• 6 Evaluative self-awareness
• 7 Towards a definition of well-being
• 8 Towards social critique
• Bibliography
• Index