Well-being studies is an exciting and relatively new multi-disciplinary
field, with data being gathered from different domains in order to
improve social policies. In its reliance on a truncated account of
well-being based implicitly on neoclassical economic assumptions,
however, the field is deeply flawed. Departing from reductive accounts
of well-being that exclude the normative or evaluative aspect of the
concept and so impoverish the attendant conception of human life, this
book offers a new perspective on what counts normatively as being well.
In reconceptualising well-being holistically, it presents a fresh vista
on how we can consider the meanings of human life in a manner that also
serves as a source of constructive social critique. The book thus
undertakes to invert the usual approach to the social sciences, in which
the research is required to be objective in terms of methodology and
subjective with regard to evaluative claims. Instead, the authors are
deliberately objective about values in order to be more open to the
subjectivities of human life. Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life
thus seeks to move away from economic considerations' domination of all
social spaces in order to understand the possibilities of well-being
beyond instrumentalisation or commodification. A radical new approach to
the human well-being, this book will appeal to philosophers, social
theorists and political scientists and all who are interested in human
happiness.
