ABSTRACT
‘Well-being’ risks becoming a hollow term, precisely because it matters so much. It seems by definition to be something we all seek and value – but at the same time, to be something we seek and value in different ways. This poses challenges at different levels: for theory, policy and practice. At the theoretical level, we struggle to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for well-being – and to distinguish contingent, temporary or culturally relative aspects of what contributes to human flourishing from elements which are somehow deeper, fixed or universal. Attempts to frame and promote well-being in policy or legislation may inevitably over-simplify what it means or the diversity of its components, or offer a reductive picture of how they relate to each other. There is a tendency to give primacy to one particular ‘take’ on well-being – perhaps medical, or psychological, or economic – and assume that the other dimensions of how we flourish can be gauged and fully accounted for through that lens. And in practice, knowing what our own or others’ well-being consists in seems to demand a panoramic sense of the self and its social context. At each of these levels, the problem at stake might be expressed in a similar way. How can we generalize about what ‘well-being’ means, while also being suitably attentive to the very many nuances and circumstantial variations in how different people, in different social positions, with different beliefs and priorities, in different places, and different stages of their life, are ‘well’? Amid such difference, is there anything universal about well-being at all?
