The GHFP has developed an innovative understanding of what well-being constitutes and how a normative and values-based approach to well-being can serve as a holistic proactive and inspirational vision for humanity.
Such a conception of well-being can form a basis for evaluating well-being in societies, framing economic and governance policy priorities, and designing social institutions that are caring and committed to supporting people’s well-being in harmony with nature.
Our conception of well-being differs from other existing theories, such as desire-fulfilment, hedonic happiness, subjective reflection, objective list, and other similar accounts. It does so by distinguishing four essential features of human living which form dimensions along which our lives might go well:
Our lives are constituted:
- 1. by meaningful experiences, activities and processes
- 2. by the quality of our awareness and recognition of the non-instrumental values in these experiences, activities and processes
- 3. by our connections and relationship inherent in those activities and processes; (4) by our self-conscious awareness of our lives as being non-instrumentally valuable. Indeed, our well-being involves a synergy that all is going well at the same time, and along these dimensions.
In particular, this account of well-being highlights the non-instrumental value of conscious beings, and the equal worth of all persons as enshrined in the UN Charter and reflected in the yearning expressed in several of recently developed charters and declarations, such as the Beirut Declaration, and Montreal Charter.
This focus can expand the concern of social policies from safeguarding human rights towards also a duty of care and values-based decision-making. This can potentially shift governance from the providing for the governed to a more engaged collaborative governance in pursuit of our collective flourishing. This is particularly pertinent as our framework conceives our natural environment as part of human well-being, rather than as a cost of it.
Our research in this domain is focusing on exploring:
- (a) the development of values-based indicators using our well-being framework
- (b) how might our conception of well-being might guide the design of institutions so that they are well-being sensitive.
These research ideas require collaboration with other groups and researchers who are willing to join us in consolidating and applying this more holistic vision of well-being, and who have expertise in the design of policy and institutions.
We are particularly excited to have become a part of the Well-Being Economy Alliance. In this way, we not only offer insights and learnings from our own process, we may also contribute to the global effort towards well-being economy.
Well-being studies is an exciting multi and inter-disciplinary field. Social scientists from around the world are gathering measurements of well-being so that the resulting data can help improve social policies. However, the field is flawed because it tends to rely on a truncated account of well-being, often implicitly based on neoclassical economic assumptions. It excludes or minimises the normative aspect of well-being, thereby depriving the concept of its potentially transformative force. It reduces human well-being to a single central notion, such as happiness or desire rankings, resulting in an impoverished conception of human life. Any empirical investigations into well-being must start with a holistic and transformative understanding of well-being located in the lived experience of being human.