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

134 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice
and Stutzer (2002, 419), then a policy that gives men priority on the
labour market will minimise the average wellbeing damage in terms of
happiness. But the fact that one demographic group (women, the worst
off, the elderly, and so forth) are made less unhappy due to a certain
event than other groups can cause perverse policy implications if life
satisfaction is declared to be the guideline for policies. Fundamental
political principles such as non-discrimination and equality of
opportunities for all citizens are thereby put into jeopardy. This would
also be true in the symmetric case where the average level of life
satisfaction of discriminated or marginalised groups does not differ
significantly from the average level of a group that is not faced with
these disadvantages. I do not want to claim here that the subjective
wellbeing approach will always lead to such injustices. But I do think
that a central focus on subjective wellbeing will make policies less
sensitive to signalling and combating these injustices. Hence Burchardt
(2005, 94) is right in pointing out that “satisfaction — the best proxy
we have for the concept of utility — is unsuitable for assessing current
wellbeing, justice or equality”.
A third worry concerns the applicability of the subjective wellbeing
approach at the national or regional levels of policy making. One may
agree that the happiness approach can be very helpful when it can offer
persons with low affect (negative moods and feelings) concrete strategies
to change that, such as engaging in mindfulness training and practice.
Yet what about policy making? Are the happiness indicators sufficiently
refined and sensitive for policy at lower levels of aggregation than the
level of a country? In their discussion of the criteria that an index of the
quality of life should meet, Hagerty and his co-authors (2001, 2) include
the criterion that the index must help policy makers to develop and
evaluate policies at all levels of aggregation. Thus, the index should not
only be useful for the national government, but also for governments in
cities, communities, and regions. As Robert van der Veen and I argued
in earlier work, overall life satisfaction does not satisfactorily meet this
criterion (Robeyns and Van der Veen 2007); it is too crude for these
purposes. It is even less suitable for the evaluation of specific policy