Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley
lie fundamental questions regarding the ‘value’ of human life, not least where, for example, this extends to judgements about abortion, embryo research, euthanasia and assisted dying (Harris, 1985). Where such judgements are not driven by religious convictions, they appear within medical circles to draw upon empiricist conception attributed to Locke, who contended that personhood requires no more than that the individual ‘can consider itself the same thinking thing in different times and places’ (Locke, 1689), from which Harris concludes that for ethical purposes a person whose right to life must be respected ‘will be any being capable of valuing its own existence’ (1985: 18), a definition which Harris concedes might apply not exclusively to human beings, but potentially to alien life forms or intelligent machines! Most significantly for our purposes, however, this is a definition that restricts the understanding of human consciousness to the sensibility of an individual being and implies what is here defined as a ‘thin’ understanding of needing and of the human condition.
Hedonic approaches to well-being have informed a succession of health-related quality of life measures that have in the first instance related wellness primarily to healthiness (Phillips, 2006: Ch. 2). But the utility or quality of life may be judged not simply in terms of healthy life expectancy, but happy life expectancy (Veenhoven, 1996).
The study of happiness
The ideal generally espoused by welfare economists has been that the optimal distribution of goods necessary for well-being is best achieved under conditions of sustained economic growth and general affluence. In this way, everyone can be happy (provided they keep healthy). At any particular point in time there is a positive correlation between a person’s happiness and her income (Di Tella & MacCullough, 2007), but there is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that economic growth does not necessarily promote additional happiness. In many countries, rising Gross National Product (GNP) does not correlate with increased well-being (Layard, 2011; B. Searle, 2008). The tiny, predominantly Buddhist, nation of Bhutan has decided it will no longer try to measure its success in terms of GNP, but GNH (Gross National Happiness) (see www.bhutanstudies.org.bt). Elsewhere, however, what has been called the ‘Easterlin paradox’ (crudely, that extra money doesn’t always buy extra happiness) has become something of a preoccupation (Easterlin, 2005).
In recent years various kinds of social scientist have turned their minds to the measurement of happiness, life-satisfaction, personal or subjective well-being. It is possible to measure such things by asking people to say how happy they feel, how satisfied they are with their lives, or to answer a battery of health-related questions to establish how ‘well’ they feel (mentally as well as physically). Whereas ‘objective’ measures of well-being might draw on indicators such as wealth or poverty statistics (as we shall see in Chapter 7), welfare economists are now interested in ‘subjective’ well-being. They have concluded that people’s replies to such simple questions as ‘How do you feel about life as a whole?’ are generally a good predictor of subjective well-being (Andrews & Withey, 1976; Deeming, 2013; Dolan & Metcalfe, 2012; B. Searle, 2008; Stiglitz et al, 2009).
There has been something of a hegemonic movement within the policy-making establishment favouring the use of subjective well-being metrics and, within academic social policy, of concepts such as Social Happiness, which is the title of a book by (the perhaps aptly named) Neil Thin (2012). Thin suggests that a ‘happiness lens’ may be brought to bear in social policy in ways that promote empathy, positivity, holism, a lifespan perspective and transparency (2012: xiv). Uplifting as this sounds, it may be argued that a happiness lens could become rose-tinted spectacles that focus on the importance of positive affect rather than substantive effects upon human well-being. Thin bemoans the ‘happiness-sized hole in policy processes and academic discourse’ (p 7), but while he is right to call for more attention to the way people feel, it is significant that enduring sources of unhappiness – for example sickness, bereavement, poverty or homelessness – do not appear even as topics in the index of his book.
It was Inglehart (1990) who first identified a cultural shift to what he called ‘post-materialism’. As advanced industrial societies became more affluent, he observed, the preoccupations of their inhabitants begin to change. As material scarcity declines people become more individualistic and introspectively preoccupied (see also U. Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). Evidence from a variety of sources, including the World Values Survey, tended to indicate that as economic growth and personal incomes rose across the developed world, empirical measures of ‘happiness’, life-satisfaction and subjective well-being had stalled. However, it is important to note: first, that the variation in happiness ‘scores’ within countries was less than that between countries, underlining the extent to which cultures are highly context specific; second, that recent time series data suggest that while overall trend in happiness levels in many of the most affluent countries has indeed been largely flat or sometimes downward over the course of the past half-century, there has been improvement in recent years. What is more, in a majority of countries – including rapidly developing countries, such as India and China, where living standards for some citizens have still to rise – the overall trend has been one of rising happiness (Inglehart et al, 2008; 2014). The trends are complex, and interpretations of aggregated data of this nature are, inevitably, contestable (see, for example, Burchardt, 2006b).
There remain well-established doubts, for example, as to the social sustainability of continuous economic growth (Hirsch, 1977); as to whether success within a perennially competitive economic environment may fuel a culture of corrosive anxiety at the level of the individual actor (Pahl, 1995); and as to whether affluence undermines general well-being (Galbraith, 1958; Offer, 2006). The economist Richard Layard (2011) has joined those who claim that riches do not bring happiness. His analysis and prescriptions are described by Jordan (2008) as neo-utilitarian in nature. Layard draws his definition of happiness from the post-Western Enlightenment liberal tradition, explicitly rejecting any eudaimonic dimension (2011: 22). He concludes that we should monitor GNP and GNH together; that we should constrain the effects of excessive inequality, exploitative work cultures and rampant consumerism; that (in the UK) we should spend more on mental health provision. But he seeks nonetheless to maximise the sum of utility and to contain the process within the parameters of a cost-effectiveness analysis. He favours the retention of welfare-to-work sanctions and the extension of moral education in schools. The implication is that with better understanding, we can make more people happier.
Psychologists in particular have investigated happiness and have made a substantial contribution to the methodological development of the subjective well-being measures mentioned earlier. We shall return to discuss psychological theories of need in Chapter 4, but there are traditions within psychology whose roots lie in medicine and biology and are