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

3. Clarifications
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mental state. In recent decades, this approach has been revitalised in
‘the happiness approach’, although empirical scholars prefer the term
‘subjective wellbeing’ (SWB). The happiness and SWB literatures have
in recent years gone through a revival.
On the empirical front, significant progress has been made in the
last few decades by an international network of economists and
psychologists, such as Andrew Clark, Ed Diener, Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell,
Bruno Frey, Richard Layard, Andrew Oswald, David Schkade, Bernard
van Praag and Ruut Veenhoven. 10 Many of these scholars have
concluded that sufficient scientific progress has been made for public
policies to focus on subjective wellbeing. The measures of subjective
wellbeing have been tested and refined, and much is supposedly known
about the determinants of happiness that the government can influence.
The happiness and SWB approaches are strongly focussed on empirical
analysis and policy design, and this is also, therefore, the main lens that
will be used in the comparison with the capability approach, although
we will very briefly discuss the comparison between the theoretical
happiness approach and the capability approach.
From the perspective of the capability approach, the happiness
approach raises three questions: First, what is the happiness approach,
exactly? Second, what are its strengths and weaknesses? Third, what
role can happiness play in the capability approach? 11
The happiness approach is based on the assumption that wellbeing (or
quality of life) is constituted by the subjective experiences of a person,
expressed in terms of utility, happiness, or satisfaction. Satisfaction
can be expressed in terms of overall satisfaction with life, or satisfaction
within particular domains, such as income, health, family relationships,
labour, and so forth.
10 See, for example, Veenhoven (1996); Kahneman et al. (2006); Schkade and
Kahneman (1998); Diener and Seligman (2004); Van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell
(2004); Ferrer-i-Carbonell (2005); Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Gowdy (2007); Frey and
Stutzer (2002).
11 This section draws on, yet also modifies and expands, the analysis presented in
Robeyns and Van der Veen (2007, 33–42).