Capabilities and Satisfaction with Life

I argue that the rapidly growing happiness literature raises an important challenge for the capability approach. Its results suggest that it has become possible to measure subjective well‐being and to compare its value for different persons. Moreover, if one accepts that the opinions of the people concerned should play some role in the evaluation of the trade‐offs between different dimensions of well‐being, the information about what makes people feel ‘more satisfied with their life as a whole’ seems relevant within the capability approach. However, for a non‐welfarist, it is necessary to ‘clean’ the happiness measure to separate the ‘ethically’ relevant information from the irrelevant noise. I suggest that the introduction of some ideas and concepts from the theory of responsibility‐sensitive egalitarianism is a promising method to reinterpret the happiness results.

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