Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

120 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
consider when we think about how to organise our collective life. While
this demarcates ‘wellbeing’ from other public values such as ‘justice’ or
‘efficiency’, this is still a very general notion that can be elaborated in
many different ways. Moreover, as was already mentioned, if we look
at the debates in contemporary philosophy of wellbeing, we notice that
they hardly relate at all to the empirical discussions in policy studies
and the social sciences (with the exception of the relatively recent boom
in subjective wellbeing analysis, which will be discussed in section 3.8).
Anna Alexandrova (2013) argues that the diversity in scholarship on
wellbeing can be explained by the fact that the meaning of the use of the
term ‘wellbeing’ differs depending on the context in which it is used. If
the word ‘wellbeing’ is used by a medical doctor, or a policy maker, or a
sociologist, or an adolescent reflecting on her options for her future life,
they all use the term ‘wellbeing’ for different purposes and in a different
context. I would like to add that, in particular, the aim or the purpose of
our use of the term ‘wellbeing’ is crucial. That is, the term ‘wellbeing’
is never used in a vacuum; each use of that term plays a role in either
explanatory or else normative projects. Normative projects always have
a purpose, that is, something to judge, evaluate or recommend, which is
precisely the choice that has to be made in module B1 in the account of
the capability approach presented in chapter 2. Depending on whether
we use the term ‘wellbeing’ for policy making, or for purely descriptive
work, or for deciding what we owe to each other as fellow citizens, the
term wellbeing will play a different function.
Most work on wellbeing in contemporary analytical philosophy is
concerned with answering the question “What would be the best for
someone, or would be most in this person’s interests, or would make
this person’s life go, for him, as well as possible?” (Parfit 1984, 493). This
is especially the case for the literature since the publication of Derek
Parfit’s typology of theories of wellbeing. While Parfit’s typology is
arguably crude, it has been very influential, and still serves an important
function as an influential attempt that a philosopher has made to classify
accounts of wellbeing.
In the next section, we will consider how (if at all) the capability
approach fits into Parfit’s typology. But it is important to note that
this highly abstract, very detailed and analytical strand in philosophy
is only to a very limited degree concerned with (a) empirical