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

3. Clarifications
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applicability and measurement or (b) practical consequences, in the
sense of action-guidance such as the establishment of normatively
sound policy making or the question of which social arrangements we
should want. The dominant contemporary philosophical literature on
wellbeing is concerned with philosophical investigation in the sense
of finding truths, and typically focussed on the entire lives of people
from their own, first-person, perspective. That literature is much less
concerned with wellbeing as an institutional value, with asking which
account of wellbeing would be best when deciding what institutions
we should implement — a question that can only be answered after
taking feasibility considerations into account, or considering what
would be best from the point of view of ethically sound policy making.
However, as Alexandrova (2013, 311) rightly points out, “the context
of an all-things-considered evaluation of life as a whole privileged by
philosophers is just that: one of the many contexts in which wellbeing is
in question”. Since most uses of the term ‘wellbeing’ in other debates,
e.g. in applied philosophy or other disciplines, are concerned with
overall evaluations of states of affairs and/or policy making, it shouldn’t
surprise us that there is very little cross-fertilisation between those
philosophical debates and the policy oriented and empirical literatures
in other disciplines. This will have an influence on how we will, in the
next section, answer the question how the capability approach fits into
the standard typology of theories of wellbeing used in philosophy.
philosophical wellbeing accounts
In Appendix I of his influential book Reasons and Persons, Parfit (1984,
493) suggests that we should make a distinction between three types of
philosophical wellbeing theories.
On Hedonistic Theories, what would be best for someone is what would
make his life happiest. On Desire-Fulfilment Theories, what would be best
for someone is what, throughout this life, would best fulfil his desires.
On Objective List Theories, certain things are good or bad for us, whether
or not we want to have the good things, or to avoid the bad things.
In interdisciplinary conversations, hedonistic theories are today
better known under the label ‘happiness theories’. Interpreted from