【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 action. What they do require is that her desires are fulfilled (or that her preferences are satisfied), which does not e down to the same thing. The two kinds of account described so far are frequently referred to as subjective accounts, because they describe a person’s wellbeing as (at least partly) a function of his or her feelings, experiences, desires, and so on. According to socalled objective accounts, by contrast, a person’s wellbeing does not depend on such subjective factors. On such accounts, “certain things are good or bad for beings, independently in at least some cases of whether they are desired or whether they give rise to pleasurable experiences” (Chappell amp。 Crisp, 1998,p. 553). Identifying the list of things that are good for people regardless of what they want is notoriously difficult, but one provisional list of such things includes “moral goodness, rational activity, the development of one’s abilities, having children and being a good parent, knowledge, and the awareness of true beauty” (Parfit, 1984,p. 499). Obviously, there are many versions of accounts of each kind.The tripartite division permits us to capture a major difference between subjective measures of wellbeing, traditional economic welfare measures, and welfare indicators inspired by the capability approach. It has been noted elsewhere that traditional economic welfare measures are based on preferencesatisfaction accounts of wellbeing (Angner, 2009a,b, in press。 Harsanyi, 1982。 Hausman amp。 McPherson, 2006). This is evident, among other things, from the fact that welfare economists traditionally have defended their measures by showing that they are utility functions, that is, that they are indices of preference satisfaction. It has also been noted that measures inspired by the capability approach are based on objectivelist accounts of wellbeing (Nussbaum, 2008。 Sen, 1987). This is clear, among other things, from the assumption that certain things – in particular, having a large capability set – are thought to be good for a person regardless of whether those things would make the person happier, and of whether the person desires Meanwhile, it is fairly obvious that many proponents of subjective measures think of wellbeing as a mental state. There is abundant evidence, for one thing, that they adhere to the experience requirement. In the literature on subjective measures,wellbeing is often described as a matter exclusively of individual subjective, hedonic, or affective experience. For example, David G. Myers quotes Madame de la Fayette as saying: “If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy,” and adds that “l(fā)ike Madame de La Fayette, social scientists view wellbeing as a state of mind. Wellbeing, sometimes called ‘subjective wellbeing’ to emphasize the point, is a pervasive sense that life is good” (Myers,1992, pp. 23, 27). Myers evidently takes wellbeing to be something thoroughly subjective。 note, in particular, the use of the term “subjective wellbeing” as synonymous with “wellbeing.” The explicit reference to states of mind strongly suggests that what he has in mind is some type of mentalstate account.Similarly, Ed Diener writes: “The area of subjective wellbeing is subjective. [It] resides within the experience of the individual” (Diener, 1984, p. 543). Diener and Eunkook Suh reinforce the point: Subjective wellbeing research is concerned with individuals’ subjective experiences of their lives. The underlying assumption is that wellbeing can be defined by people’s conscious experiences—in terms of hedonic feelings or cognitive satisfactions. The field is built on the presumption that to understand the individuals’ experiential quality of wellbeing, it is appropriate to directly examine how a person feels about life in the context of his or her own standards (Diener amp。 Suh, 1997, p. 191).Diener and Suh, like Myers and the authors to whom he refers, apparently use the term “wellbeing” interchangeably with “subjective wellbeing.” The fact that Diener and Suh argue that wellbeing is not only concerned with the individual’s subjective experiences, but defined by them, strongly suggests that they adhere to the experience requirement.Several authors emphasize the subjective character of wellbeing, as they use the term, by contrasting subjective measures with “objective” ones, including social and economic indicators. Diener makes this point in the following way: Notably absent from definitions of SWB [subjective wellbeing] are necessary objective conditions such as health, fort, virtue, or wealth. Although such conditions are seen as potential influences on SWB, they are not seen as an inherent and necessary part of it (Diener, 1984, p. 543).6This quote confirms that, in Diener’s work, an individual’s wellbeing is defined not by the objective circumstances in which she finds herself, but by her subjective experiences, though he allows the former to be causally responsible for the latter. Daniel Kahneman, who identifies wellbeing with happiness, adds that happiness “is not to be confused with good fortune, which is an assessment of the circumstances of someone’s life” (Kahneman,1999, p. 5). In Kahneman’s view, it is possible to enjoy good fortune– presumably ine, health, and so on – without being Campbell (1976), quoted in Diener (1984, p. 543), expands on this point. Campbell maintains: “The gross national product, important as it undoubtedly is, is clearly not the ultimate touchstone against which the quantum of happiness in this country can be assessed” (Campbell, 1976, p. 117). He continues: If we are primarily concerned with describing the quality of life experience of the population, we will need measures different from those that are used to describe the objective circumstances in which people live. We will have to develop measures that go directly to the experience itself. These subjective measures will surely not have the precision of indicators tha