Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a
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3. Clarifications<br />
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these phenomena, <strong>and</strong> this may result in the counter-intuitive policy<br />
implications we mentioned earlier.<br />
<br />
<strong>The</strong> second worry about the happiness or SWB approach concerns<br />
the effect of group differences, which will be a problem if we need an<br />
account of wellbeing to compare wellbeing levels between groups. <strong>The</strong><br />
subjective wellbeing approach focuses on the affective <strong>and</strong> cognitive<br />
responses of people to their lives overall, or in particular domains. If<br />
groups differ on average in their responses to a situation, then this<br />
may cause problems for policies, if those differences correlate with the<br />
objective circumstances that one would intuitively judge as important.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re are two symmetric possibilities: (1) groups who are in the same<br />
objective situation have different levels of life satisfaction, or (2) groups<br />
with the same level of life satisfaction are in different situations, whereby<br />
it is clear that one situation is worse than the other independently of<br />
subjective wellbeing.<br />
<strong>Re</strong>search has indeed shown that the average level of life satisfaction<br />
between demographic groups differs systematically. In other words, if<br />
we control for the relevant factors, then some groups are significantly<br />
less satisfied with their lives than others. For example, recent Australian<br />
research (Cummins et al. 2003) shows that women report a higher<br />
level of overall life satisfaction than men, after taking a number of<br />
control-variables into account. 15 <strong>The</strong> researchers cannot pinpoint the<br />
exact causes of this finding, but they do not exclude the possibility that<br />
women are ‘constitutionally’ more satisfied than men. This may have a<br />
biological explanation, but it may also be the consequence of processes<br />
of adaptation that men <strong>and</strong> women experience differently over their<br />
lifetimes.<br />
If the aim of the account of wellbeing is to inform public policy, then<br />
the question is how government should deal with these findings. From<br />
a utilitarian perspective, it would be efficient to develop a policy that<br />
is advantageous to men. For example, if due to unemployment men<br />
experience a larger drop in happiness than women, as reported by Frey<br />
15 A similar strong <strong>and</strong> significant gender effect has been found by Eriksson, Rice <strong>and</strong><br />
Goodin (2007).