In this section, I first show that contextualism can account for the intuition that well-being theorising, even if labouring with different concepts, are about the same thing because all such theorising shares the same subject matter. I then present the upshots of these results for contextualist well-being theorising and measurements. The subsequent section concludes.
3.1 The Shared Standard Challenge
As argued, contextualism can avoid the conclusion that those investigating well-being’s nature systematically speak past each other when making well-being ascriptions. They can do so by relying on the formal commitment of providing suitable mappings of well-being concepts and standards. Since
suitability is involved, however, contextualism’s open-endedness is restricted in one way or another. As evidence that not any- and everything goes on contextualism, consider that some well-being assessments cut across all contexts. If those well-being assessments are accurate, Fletcher’s counterargument can be bolstered from a substantive perspective on top of the primarily semantic one. This strategy does not try to establish that we could not have a shared understanding of well-being without having the same concept. Rather, this strategy involves stating that we
have a shared standard regardless of which concepts are used to refer to it. If that is so, then all legitimate well-being speech/theorising will be about that shared standard of well-being. One way of capturing such a shared standard is to focus less on what makes lives good for us who live them, and more on conditions that make lives bad for those living them. In brief, we can distinguish being disadvantaged, i.e., not being well (in any context-sensitive sense) from suffering from ill-being, i.e., being unwell
simpliciter (Kagan,
2014; Sumner,
2020; Östlund,
2021). As I will now show, ill-being assessments present a worry for contextualists who reject that a universal and shared well-being standard exists.
To illustrate, consider things such as torturous suffering, homelessness, discrimination, domination, and unending addiction. They appear worse for us than the positive items on plausible hedonistic, desire-based, or perfectionist, theories do. Regarding people’s ill-being, there is a substantive difference between not doing well in some given sense and being badly off without reference to any deprivation of context-dependent goodness. Even if the concept of well-being is thin, as contextualists maintain, the concept still suffices for some stable assessments of betterness or worseness. Hence, contextualists face a challenge to explain why some states of affairs stably strike us as context-independently prudentially worse than other ones. Those stable assessments prima facie indicate that there is a shared well-being standard being used in our assessments. Thus, we may call this the shared standard challenge.
To illustrate, there is no context in which it would be good for us to be, say, tortured. One driving reason is because torture often, if perhaps not universally, involves a severe degree of humiliation (van der Rijt,
2016), but the suffering alone might suffice if humiliation happens to be absent from the tortured person’s experience. That said, the challenge may be objected to by the contextualist camp on the grounds that the alleged prudential badness of, as in this case, torture, is not something that always ought to be avoided. For instance, it
may be better to be tortured than to be killed in some scenarios. That claim, I gauge, is true. But it still appears to
always be
bad for a person to be tortured. The fact that comparative assessments of there being even worse things does not defuse the charge that certain things, such as torture, are unequivocally bad prudentially. In no way is
being tortured (or homeless, or discriminated, or dominated, or addicted, etc.) better than to
not be tortured (or have the other states absent rather than present), everything else remaining equal. The presences of such life-experiences strike us as stably, and inescapably, bad for us to endure. Hence, though we can speak of
degrees of prudential badness regarding the examples of ill-being above, they are universally bad for us.
A well-being monistic intuition can thus be generated which states that we have the same thing in mind when we analyse, talk about, or operationalise, well-being by looking at instances of ill-being. Hence, the well-being monist can grant the contextualist claim that different concepts are expressed by different theoreticians, but nevertheless deny that those concepts will refer to different things in different settings, which is arguably the main point of having several well-being concepts in use for the contextualist. If all well-being concepts refer to the same thing, i.e., the same standard of well-being at some level of description, then we may still construct an overarching and exhaustive theory of that thing, which would be a significant concession to well-being monism. Hence, for contextualists, addressing the semantic part of Fletcher’s counterargument is insufficient. The shared standard challenge must also be met if the contextualist position is to support its multiple-mappings claim.
In principle, contextualists could respond to the shared standard challenge by trying to debunk the intuitions underlying our stable assessments that the challenge involves. Those intuitions about context-independent prudential worseness could, e.g., allegedly stem from us having internalised the main well-being theories with disregard to well-being’s inescapable context-dependence. Such a response denies that the open-endedness of contextualism should be curtailed. However, it could analogously be argued that anything we consider prudentially valuable is questionable for the same reason. Such a debunking strategy will lead to a thoroughgoing scepticism about well-being’s properties. Hence, if contextualists are to offer a response that supports a proliferation of theories and measures, which separates the contextualist from the well-being monist and those who would argue that well-being does not exist (eliminativists), a non-debunking response to the shared standard challenge is needed.
As a first attempt, consider that another contextualist response regarding the stableness of our intuitions regarding ill-being is that they may be coincidental findings. This response suggests that the items (torture, etc.) do not have to share the same basis for being considered bad. For instance, they may be parts of an objective list of prudential badness. However, it should be noted that such a coincidental set of findings still indicates that contextualism might not ever allow for disjoint standards of well-being. The main reason is that such standards would always need to involve the relevant dimensions of ill-being, including that of being tortured. Hence, a more systematic response should be given for the contextualist position to benefit.
Consequently, I will proffer a contextualist response to the shared standard challenge and, more precisely, one that accepts the intuitions that underlie it. Lives can go badly beyond merely not attaining some prudentially positive dimension. Fletcher’s response to the contextualist argument is that the intuitions it generates are accurate, namely that we have different things in mind in different contexts. The divergence between contextualism and Fletcher’s view is that contextualists maintain that those intuitions are about different types of well-being whereas Fletcher maintains that they are about different aspects of the same type of well-being.
Analogously to Fletcher’s response to the contextualist arguments, I will begin by agreeing with the intuitions generated, i.e., the ‘data’ used in the arguments, but reject that they support well-being monism. To offer an example, consider that someone may have an unfulfilling career, perhaps working at a job that requires her to spend most of her waking hours on menial, tiring, tasks. That scenario is importantly different from lacking a context-dependently positive dimension of well-being such as enjoying a meaningful, valued career. Merely not doing well by having a career one neither cares for nor dislikes falls somewhere in-between these two things by being prudentially neutral. How can contextualists account for these stable intuitions?
Contextualists can account for these intuitions by maintaining that some states of affairs are substantively bad for us in a way that bars them from being (even) contextually good for us. Concepts and measures can then proliferate only on the condition that they avoid counting what is bad for us as being good for us. The well-being monist approach of avoiding this is to use the grounding criterion to determine which properties are incontrovertibly good for us (and hence will not include what would be bad for us, as the properties cannot be both at the same time).
Contextualists cannot rely on the grounding criterion, since the scope of the good-for-making property G has to cover each well-being dimension, but somehow not in each context. However, contextualists can use disqualification criteria to bar properties from inclusion in lists of prudentially good properties. That said, each context-dependent theory or application do not need to include all (or even any) ill-being dimensions. In a setting where we consider, say, rehabilitation from substance addictions, it does not strike us as salient to consider torture as something we should actively keep in mind. For settings where we evaluate the well-being of prisoners of war, however, torture and lack thereof would certainly be significant. Hence, contextualists can maintain its multiple-mappings claim, and though they are pressed to affirm that some things are inescapably bad for us, they are only salient for some well-being analyses.
Through this move, contextualists can maintain that all well-being concepts and standards must satisfy the condition of not counting what is incontrovertibly bad for us as being (even) contextually good for us. Even if some profoundly negative experiences may eventually give a person insight into what matters in life, the negative experiences are not to be counted as constitutively good for that person. Someone who endures, say, homelessness and comes to see empathy and generosity as worthwhile to foster in oneself and others may reach insight that they then take to be of prudential value to them. Nevertheless, that benefit would be gained as a consequence of her plights, her plights are not constitutive of any benefit she may receive.
At this stage, well-being monists may raise an objection. Does the response not implicitly affirm that ill-being has an essence, that the concept of ill-being circumscribes that essence, and that any theory of ill-being should capture all and only those properties? Briefly put, my proffered response may seem to introduce a significant asymmetry into well-being theorising.
However, such a significant asymmetry can be avoided. Consider that contextualism rejects each of well-being monism’s three claims: (i) that there are essential properties to well-being, (ii) that the concept of well-being circumscribes those properties, and (iii) that any well-being theory ought to capture all, and only, those properties. One can more modestly deny that there is any essence to ill-being or concept circumscribing it but maintain that we should capture all and only the relevant properties. This imposes a restriction to contextualism’s open-endedness but is not a concession to well-being monism. For instance, my response is compatible with
hybrid theories of ill-being. On hybrid theories, subjective attitudes and objectivist determinations are both individually sufficient to determine prudential dimensions (cf. Wall and Sobel,
2021). Instead of privileging subjective or objective properties, both kinds can play decisive roles when determining prudential dimensions (Griffin,
2007, p. 142). The dimensions of ill-being therefore offer a substantive limitation on contextualist well-being theories. But they do not thereby amount to an exhaustive shared standard of what well-being consists in.
In objection, a well-being monist may argue that if ill-being dimensions should never be counted as good for us – even contextually – then can we not similarly argue that plausible positive dimensions should never be counted as bad for us? The argument could, for instance, suggest that it is the case that euphoria or bliss (or some other example) is incontrovertibly positive, and hence that well-being monism can be maintained with an analogue argument.
In response, I note two things. First, incontrovertibly positive dimensions may exist. If some incontrovertibly positive dimension exists, then context-sensitive theories ought to not count it as bad for us. However, that alone does not entail that well-being monism is true. It is possible that all suitable well-being concepts and standards have a common core but differ regarding other, context-sensitive, dimensions. Additionally, those incontrovertibly positive dimensions may not be salient in each context. To illustrate, if we consider someone’s lack of lodging, for instance, as something to alleviate, then compensating her homelessness with some bliss (or what have you) may not be a reasonable enough compensation. Analogously, this is similar to how giving a starving child a toy to play with does little to alleviate her starvation – which may be more pressing to do. This point, it should be noted, could be assented to by aspectualists as well. This is not a win for contextualists in the sense that only contextualism explains how we may look at different things in different contexts. Aspectualists can also allow for this. However, the difference between contextualism and aspectualism is that there does not need to be an exhaustive theory that each more context-sensitive application is a (proper) subset of.
Furthermore, with regard to unequivocally positive dimensions, some asymmetries seem to remain between ill-being and well-being, in that well-being monists will have their respective reasons to agree that certain states of affairs are bad for us even if they disagree as to what those reasons are. Perhaps homelessness is bad for us because of painful experiences, or frustrated desires, or by involving unhealthy relationships. Euphoria or bliss, however, is not incontrovertibly positive even on well-being monist views. Hence, the onus is on well-being monists to not only show that such incontrovertibly positive dimensions exist but also that they exhaust what (positive) well-being consists in and, furthermore, that they are salient in each context. In sum, the ill-being intuitions can be addressed without relying on a shared standard.
3.2 Applications and Upshots
In what follows, I illustrate the upshots of context-sensitive well-being theories, operationalisations, and policy-applications. I do so by drawing on the capability approach because it offers a way of analysing values that explicitly lends itself to context-sensitive work. Capabilitarian well-being theories and applications can diverge. Divergent theories and applications focusing on different things would be problematic if well-being monism were unavoidable. However, contextualism can support such divergent theories and applications. Furthermore, while I use the capability approach as an illustration, it should be noted that contextualism can also be applied to other context-sensitive theories and practical uses.
According to the capability approach, well-being consists in multiple dimensions. The capability approach provides two core concepts to describe the relevant dimensions (Sen,
1993, p. 38). First, the concept of
functionings refers to people’s beings and doings, such as satisfying nutritional needs. Second, the concept of
capabilities refers to genuine opportunities to realise functionings. Schematically, an opportunity to
X is genuine when internal conditions and external conditions are jointly sufficient for a person to be or do
X. For instance, a person has a genuine opportunity to secure nutritional needs when her digestive system is healthy, and she has access to food. Capabilitarians consequently tend to speak of people’s well-being achievements – functionings – and well-being freedom – capabilities (Crocker,
2006, p. 156; Qizilbash,
2022, p. 166). The distinction between capabilities and functionings is notable in that capabilities can be beneficial even when they are not converted into functionings. For instance, fasting and starving are prudentially different in that a person who could eat appears to be better off than someone who cannot (Sen,
1985, pp. 200–201,
1992, p. 52,
1999, p. 76). Capabilitarian well-being theories thus consist in lists of functionings and/or capabilities that purportedly constitute dimensions of well-being. However, there are disagreements over which dimensions matter, why they do so, and to what extent they can be aggregated (Sen,
1999, pp. 76–81).
Dimensions may be exemplified by allegedly necessary items such as Nussbaum’s central human capabilities (
1990, p. 225,
1992, p. 222,
2011, pp. 33–34). They are genuine opportunities to be and do those things that facilitate a flourishing human life according to Aristotelian philosophical views of human nature. Nussbaum’s proposal can be seen as a foundational theory of well-being (or ‘flourishing’), which would have primacy over alternative accounts. Such alternative accounts stem, in part, from theoreticians who use procedurally made lists grounded in public reasoning (Sen,
2004a,
b, p. 333; Qizilbash,
2007, pp. 170,176–177). Yet others combine both these perspectives to provide philosophical and political proposals for formulating capability lists (Claassen,
2011; Byskov,
2017,
2018; Östlund,
2023). Thus, the capability approach is not
one well-being theory but
a framework that among other things can be used to formulate well-being theories (Robeyns,
2016, p. 403,
2017, pp. 125–126).
The capability approach offers more than theoretical developments, in that its use is often motivated by aims of conceptualising, measuring, and alleviating, e.g., severe poverty. Hence, there are both different theories of well-being captured in capabilitarian terms, and different characterisations of phenomena that are measured. Among the operationalisations, the Human Development Index as well as the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index capture certain proposed capabilitarian dimensions that some, albeit not all, capability theories list (UNDP,
2010, pp. 15–16; Alkire et al.,
2018, p. 5). The proliferations of theories and operationalisations are considered core strengths of the capability approach. A significant reason is that the proliferations allow for tailor-made specifications of what matters well-being wise, in a given context, and differently wide-ranging policy-applications. Consequently, however, different capabilitarian well-being theories and empirical accounts can differ substantially from others.
To illustrate how such differences can occur, we may have different capability lists being salient for different social groups. The relevant functionings or capabilities in a sector designed to help those who are homeless may be best achieved by one list, L1, in a certain setting. And while we may expect some overlap, with a list, L2, for helping those who are addicted, the overlap will be imperfect. The list-items, moreover, can be more fine-grained than what would count as good for all people. Hence, capabilitarians do not always consider some particular “master list”, ML, as something that L1 or L2 need to be proper subsets (i.e., smaller segments) of. The relevance of a particular list will depend on its relation to its area of implementation and what matters to people in that context, not on how well it coheres with the master list ML.
Note that on the well-being monist view, there should be some master list of capabilities and functionings roughly equivalent to some version of Fletcher’s aspectualism. As compatible with that end, notable developments such as Wolff and de-Shalit’s (
2007, p. 38,
2013) work on disadvantage expand on Nussbaum’s central human capabilities. They would, on this view, be committed to providing
the true theory. All subsequent operationalisations or measurements of well-being, then, would only be valid insofar as they capture that target prudential property.
There are two aims in play here that should be separated, namely (1) that of providing a context-sensitive well-being theory, and (2) that of providing a context-sensitive measurement that maps to a suitable well-being theory. Capabilitarians typically allow for context-sensitivity with regard to theorising and with regard to which measurement(s) best map to a relevant well-being theory. By supporting contextualism, as done above, the first of these aims is lent support.
To illustrate, on a comparatively general level, the capability approach framework can be used to formulate well-being theories that take the form of an informed desire-theory or an objective list (Qizilbash,
2013, p. 37; Robeyns,
2017, p. 126). A reason for adopting certain restrictions on what matters well-being wise is that unconstrained feelings and attitudes appear to steer us wrong. For instance, feelings and attitudes are sensitive to problematic adaptations, like when a hopeless homeless beggar expects less than she ought to and is pleased or satisfied by that inadequate amount (Sen,
1987, pp. 45–46; Terlazzo,
2014,
2017; van der Deijl,
2017). Whilst these restrictions establish that not any- and everything goes, well-being dimensions can vary considerably depending on whether an objective list is chosen, among other examples of objective lists, or an informed desire-theory is chosen, among others. Though some take their work to be geared to producing (parts of) a master list, others have a more open-ended view, even combining the grounds of selection from both informed desires and objective lists.
For instance, some proposals in the literature use a strategy in which purpose-dependence of theorising plays a large role. That purpose may come apart, for instance, from being representative of some purportedly privileged philosophical theory (cf. Parker,
2020, pp. 459–460). Applying this kind of view, the proposals on offer may still have a use in determining the circumstances that facilitate
some salient notion of well-being, dependent on, e.g., methodological constraints, and background conditions for enacting well-being policies. Some capabilitarians who work in this tradition therefore aim to balance theoretical accuracy against practical efficacy or political legitimacy (Byskov,
2017,
2018; Östlund,
2023). Such balancing of determinations of well-being’s constituents, however, merits justification since collections of capability lists are prone to involve exclusive properties. If such lists are to co-exist rather than compete, as they would on the well-being monist view, some justification is needed.
To that end, contextualism shows how purpose-dependent well-being theories can co-exist without there being a master list that each purpose-dependent theory is a smaller segment of. They may partially overlap, have a family resemblance, or be disjoint. What matters is whether the theories are suitable to their purposes, not whether the theories converge on the same targeted good-for-making property. By
suitability to a purpose, I do not merely have epistemic goals in mind, though those are useful to consider as well. Rather, the purposes in question are
practical, and more specifically to promote the ends that let people achieve well-being or avoid ill-being. As exemplified earlier, different capability lists apply differently well in different contexts. Even though the purposes are practical, however, it should be noted that they require meeting epistemic goals, too, since to know what promotes some end will involve meeting certain epistemic preconditions (cf. Parker,
2020, pp. 460–461). Hence, determining suitability will involve both identifying contexts and what constitutively improves outcomes in them.
My argument tries to merge theoretical and practical concerns, and hence a counterargument is available to well-being monists since contextualist theories will not determine which policies to enact. Though Haybron and Tiberius (
2015, p. 713) are detractors to the idea that policy-work should be grounded in
the correct well-being theory, this idea is typically endorsed. Yet, it cannot be with reference to
the correct well-being theory that we enact well-being policies, if contextualism is true. Hence, Haybron and Tiberius are right that we should not ground our decisions in some putatively correct theory. I suggest that the reasons for this are not only pragmatic but – if contextualism is true – also motivated on separate grounds.
The objection therefore cannot be that
contextualists cannot provide judgments about what is best to do well-being wise without qualification. If contextualism is true, the best anyone can do is to offer provisional justification for policy-recommendations by making the conditions for suitability between concepts, standards, and contexts, explicit. This response relies on the idea that there may be incommensurable or incomparable values in the sense that they cannot be ranked as better than, worse than, or equal to, each other (cf. Griffin,
2007, p. 145).
The upshot that contextualism offers is that conditions for doing well or poorly enters the analytical process without requiring a consensus on well-being’s essence. On an abstract, general, level of description, it may be true that societies should aim to do good by promoting the well-being of their members. However, what doing well by them entails can differ and it is not a foregone conclusion that each dimension is similarly relevant for every person in each setting. Contextualism accommodates room for malleable well-being ascriptions without us speaking past each other. Recall, the formal commitment to provide suitable mappings of well-being concepts and standards grounds the subject matter. Nor do we need to rely on a shared well-being standard that stable intuitions about betterness and worseness stem from. Nor, finally, does any- and everything go, since ill-being dimensions provide substantive boundaries.
In sum, contextualism differs from well-being monism concerning the mappings between well-being concepts and standards. Contrary to appearances, contextualist well-being researchers need not consider that which is incontrovertibly bad for us as being – even contextually – good for us, nor do they need to make concessions to the well-being monist. Other restrictions may be specified in the future by identifying further conditions of suitability. For now, the well-being monistic challenge to contextualism has been rebutted, showing that the contextualist position is in a better position to vindicate the claim that theories and measures can proliferate without us speaking past each other, nor relying on a shared standard of well-being. The upshots of this are not only theoretical, but also practical in supporting real-world well-being work that, if well-being monism were true, would otherwise be on shakier grounds.