Well-being
Well-being, or wellbeing,[1] also known as wellness, prudential value, prosperity or quality of life, is what is intrinsically valuable relative to someone. So the well-being of a person is what is ultimately good for this person, what is in the self-interest of this person.[2] Well-being can refer to both positive and negative well-being. In its positive sense, it is sometimes contrasted with ill-being as its opposite.[3] The term "subjective well-being" denotes how people experience and evaluate their lives, usually measured in relation to self-reported well-being obtained through questionnaires.[4]
For the TV channel, see Wellbeing (TV). For other uses, see Welfare (disambiguation).Well-being has been treated as a variable ranging from none to a high degree of well-being. This usage of well-being has in later times been widened to also include a negative aspect. With the aim of understanding how different route environmental variables affect the wellbeing during walking or cycling, the term "environmental unwellbeing" has been coined.[5][6]
Overview[edit]
Different forms of well-being, such as mental, physical, economic, or emotional[7] are often closely interlinked. For example, improved physical well-being (e.g., by reducing or ceasing an addiction) is associated with improved emotional well-being.[8] As for another example, better economic well-being (e.g., possessing more wealth) tends to be associated with better emotional well-being even in adverse situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic.[9][10] Well-being plays a central role in ethics since what a person ought to do depends, at least to some degree, on what would make someone's life get better or worse.[7] According to welfarism, there are no other values besides well-being.[2]
The terms well-being, pleasure, and happiness are used in overlapping ways in everyday language, but their meanings tend to come apart in technical contexts like philosophy or psychology. Pleasure refers to experience that feels good and is usually seen as one constituent of well-being. But there may be other factors, such as health, virtue, knowledge or the fulfillment of desires.[11] Happiness for example, often seen either as "the individual's balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience"[12] or as the state of being satisfied with one's life as a whole,[12] is also commonly taken to be a constituent of well-being.
Theories of well-being try to determine what is essential to all forms of well-being. Hedonistic theories equate well-being with the balance of pleasure over pain. Desire theories hold that well-being consists in desire-satisfaction: the higher the number of satisfied desires, the higher the well-being. Objective list theories state that a person's well-being depends on a list of factors that may include both subjective and objective elements.[13][14]
Well-being is also scientifically dependent on endogenous molecules that impact feelings of happiness such as dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, cortisol and more[15][16] "Well-being related markers" or "Well-being bio markers"[17] play an important role in the regulation of an organism's metabolism, and when not working in proper order can lead to malfunction.[16]
Well-being is the central subject of positive psychology, which aims to discover the factors that contribute to human well-being.[18] Martin Seligman, for example, suggests that these factors consist in having positive emotions, being engaged in an activity, having good relationships with other people, finding meaning in one's life and a sense of accomplishment in the pursuit of one's goals.[19]
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the term well-being to a 16th-century calque of the Italian concept benessere.[20]
Welfarism[edit]
Welfarism is a theory of value based on well-being. It states that well-being is the only thing that has intrinsic value, i.e. that is good in itself and not just good as a means to something else.[60][61][62] On this view, the value of a situation or whether one alternative is better than another only depends on the degrees of well-being of each entity affected. All other factors are relevant to value only to the extent that they have an impact on someone's well-being.[60][61] The well-being in question is usually not restricted to human well-being but includes animal well-being as well.[62]
Different versions of welfarism offer different interpretations of the exact relation between well-being and value. Pure welfarists offer the simplest approach by holding that only the overall well-being matters, for example, as the sum total of everyone's well-being. This position has been criticized in various ways.[60][63] On the one hand, it has been argued that some forms of well-being, like sensory pleasures, are less valuable than other forms of well-being, like intellectual pleasures.[64][65][66] On the other hand, certain intuitions indicate that what matters is not just the sum total but also how the individual degrees of well-being are distributed. There is a tendency to prefer equal distributions where everyone has roughly the same degree instead of unequal distributions where there is a great divide between happy and unhappy people, even if the overall well-being is the same.[60][63][67] Another intuition concerning the distribution is that people who deserve well-being, like the morally upright, should enjoy higher degrees of well-being than the undeserving.[60][63]
These criticisms are addressed by another version of welfarism: impure welfarism. Impure welfarists agree with pure welfarists that all that matters is well-being. But they allow aspects of well-being other than its overall degree to have an impact on value, e.g. how well-being is distributed.[60][63] Pure welfarists sometimes argue against this approach since it seems to stray away from the core principle of welfarism: that only well-being is intrinsically valuable. But the distribution of well-being is a relation between entities and therefore not intrinsic to any of them.[63]
Some objections based on counterexamples are directed against all forms of welfarism. They often focus on the idea that there are things other than well-being that have intrinsic value. Putative examples include the value of beauty, virtue, or justice.[68][69][70][71] Such arguments are often rejected by welfarists holding that the cited things would not be valuable if they had no relation to well-being. This is often extended to a positive argument in favor of welfarism based on the claim that nothing would be good or bad in a world without sentient beings.[60][67] In this sense, welfarists may agree that the cited examples are valuable in some form but disagree that they are intrinsically valuable.[67]
Some authors see welfarism as including the ethical thesis that morality fundamentally depends on well-being.[62][63] On this view, welfarism is also committed to the consequentialist claim that actions, policies, or rules should be evaluated based on how their consequences affect everyone's well-being.[72]