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Spring comes with many little rituals and urges: A deep clean, the shelving of winter jackets, a desire for a salad instead of soup and an urgent, gnawing need to buy and cultivate as many plants as possible (garden optional). Nature is aligned: The stretch of time right before summer is also the moment when bright, flashy flowers start to bloom and suddenly your lawn needs to be cut……Continue reading…..
By Sarah Sloat
Source: Inverse
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Critics:
The well-being of a person is what is good for the person. Theories of well-being try to determine which features of a state are responsible for this state contributing to the person’s well-being. Theories of well-being are often classified into hedonistic theories, desire theories, and objective list theories.
Hedonistic theories and desire theories are subjective theories. According to them, the degree of well-being of a person depends on the subjective mental states and attitudes of this person. Objective list theories, on the other hand, allow that things can benefit a person independent of that person’s subjective attitudes towards these things.
For hedonistic theories, the relevant mental states are experiences of pleasure and pain. One example of such an account can be found in Jeremy Bentham’s works, where it is suggested that the value of experiences only depends on their duration and the intensity of pleasure or pain present in them. Various counterexamples have been formulated against this view.
They usually involve cases where lower aggregate pleasure are intuitively preferable, for example, that the intellectual or aesthetic pleasures are superior to sensory pleasures or that it would be unwise to enter Robert Nozick’s experience machine. These counter-examples are not necessarily conclusive, yet the proponent of hedonistic theories faces the challenge of explaining why common-sense misleads us in the problematic cases.
Desire theories can avoid some of the problems of hedonistic theories by holding that well-being consists in desire-satisfaction: the higher the number of satisfied desires, the higher the well-being. One problem for some versions of desire theory is that not all desires are good: some desires may even have terrible consequences for the agent. Desire theorists have tried to avoid this objection by holding that what matters are not actual desires but the desires the agent would have if she was fully informed.
Thus, desire theories can incorporate what is plausible about subjective theories of well-being with the lack of personal bias of objective list theories. Objective list theories state that a person’s well-being depends on many different basic objective goods. These goods often include subjective factors like a pleasure-pain-balance or desire-satisfaction besides factors that are independent of the subject’s attitudes, like friendship or having virtues.
Objective list theories face the problem of explaining how subject-independent factors can determine a person’s well-being even if this person does not care about these factors. Another objection concerns the selection of the specific factors included. Different theorists have provided very different combinations of basic objective goods. These groupings seem to constitute arbitrary selections unless a clear criterion could be provided why all and only the items within their selections are relevant factors.
Three subdisciplines in psychology are critical for the study of psychological well-being:
- Developmental psychology, in which psychological well-being may be analyzed in terms of a pattern of growth across the lifespan.
- Personality psychology, in which it is possible to apply Maslow’s concept of self-actualization, Rogers’ concept of the fully functioning person, Jung’s concept of individuation, and Allport’s concept of maturity to account for psychological well-being.
- Clinical psychology, in which well-being consists of biological, psychological and social needs being met.
According to Corey Keyes’ five-component model, social well-being is constituted by the following factors:
- social integration,
- social contribution,
- social coherence,
- social actualization,
- social acceptance.
There are two approaches typically taken to understand psychological well-being:
- Distinguishing positive and negative effects and defining optimal psychological well-being and happiness as a balance between the two.
- Emphasizes life satisfaction as the key indicator of psychological well-being.
According to Guttman and Levy (1982) well-being is “…a special case of attitude”. This approach serves two purposes in the study of well-being: “developing and testing a [systematic] theory for the structure of [interrelationships] among varieties of well-being, and integration of well-being theory with the ongoing cumulative theory development in the fields of attitude of related research”.
Different forms of well-being, such as mental, physical, economic, or emotional 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. And 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.
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. According to welfarism, there are no other values besides well-being. 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. Happiness for example, often seen either as “the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience” or as the state of being satisfied with one’s life as a whole, 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.
Well-being is also scientifically dependent on endogenous molecules that impact feelings of happiness such as dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, cortisol and more “Well-being related markers” or “Well-being bio markers”play an important role in the regulation of an organism’s metabolism, and when not working in proper order can lead to malfunction.
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