The concept of well-being is increasingly gaining acceptance as an object of science, and many different types of well-being measures have been developed. A debate has emerged about which measures are able to capture well-being successfully. An important underlying problem is that there is no unified conceptual framework about the nature of well-being—a hotly debated topic of philosophical discussion. I argue that while there is little agreement about the nature of well-being in philosophy, there is an important agreement on some important principles relevant for its measurement. I argue that well-being science has good reasons to accommodate these principles, but currently fails to do so.
Measures of happiness are increasingly being used throughout the social sciences. While these measures have attracted numerous types of criticisms, a crucial aspect of these measures has been left largely unexplored—their calibration. Using Eran Tal’s recently developed notion of calibration we argue first that the prospect of continued calibration of happiness measures is crucial for the science of happiness, and second, that continued calibration of happiness measures faces a particular problem—The Two Unknowns Problem. The Two Unknowns Problem relies on the claim that individuals are necessarily a part of the measurement apparatus in first person measures of happiness, and the claim that we have no reason to believe that the evaluation standards people employ are invariant across individuals and time. We argue that calibrating happiness measures therefore involves solving an equation with two unknowns—an individual’s degree of happiness, and their evaluation standards—which is, generally, not possible. Third, we consider two possible escape routes from this problem and we suggest that the most promising route requires yet unexplored empirical and theoretical work on linking happiness to behavioral or neural evidence.
Can a person’s degree of wellbeing be affected by things that do not enter her experience? Experientialists deny that it can, extra-experientialists affirm it. The debate between these two positions has focused on an argument against experientialism—the experience machine objection—but few arguments exist for it. I present an argument for experientialism. It builds on the claim that theories of wellbeing should not only state what constitutes wellbeing, but also which entities are welfare subjects. Moreover, the claims it makes about these two issues should have a certain coherence with each other. I argue that if we accept a particular plausible answer to the second question—namely that all and only sentient beings are welfare subjects—extra-experientialist theories face a problem of coherence. While this problem can typically be solved, doing so will involve steps that are unattractive. On experientialist theories, on the other hand, the answer to these questions cohere perfectly.
This review examines the origin and structure of the complex well-being (WB) concept as it is currently applied in behavioral and social sciences. Current research on WB is often divided into two perspectives: subjective well-being (SWB) and psychological well-being (PWB), shaped by the philosophical concepts of hedonism and eudaimonism, respectively. How these different views relate to each other and to WB as a whole has not yet been clearly defined, leading to difficulties in interpretation. In this review, we aim to get more insight into the relation between SWB and PWB. We first present an overview of the philosophical history of SWB and PWB, followed by a systematic literature review. The goal of this review, based on 29 studies, was to investigate how much evidence there is for a conceptual overlap between SWB and PWB. A majority of the studies found appreciable shared variance between the constructs, suggesting that they might be more closely related than previously assumed. On the other hand, evidence from biological studies provides mixed results: a distinction between SWB and PWB based on unique biomarkers is reported, while recent molecular genetic studies show strong genomic overlap between SWB and PWB, but different gene-expression regulation. We end with a discussion on how these findings fit into a well-being framework, and describe some of the issues in the well-being field as we encountered them in our review followed by potential solutions to these problems.
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