Objective and Subjective Concepts of Quality of Life

In Des Gasper’s review of the various conceptions of quality of life and well-being, he describes the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ as the temptation of making a rhetorical shortcut to presenting ‘quality of life’ as if it were a concrete entity (Gasper 2010). In this section, we will not be able to avoid some degree of general-ization because the body of literature is very large and spans multiple fields. Our focus here is on the way that philosophical thought and empirical research on qual-ity of life research has treated the issue of objectivqual-ity and subjectivqual-ity.

Intellectual thought on the ‘good life’ is as old as recorded history and it has preoccupied some of the most outstanding minds in philosophy and social sciences.

What we understand by ‘quality of life’ is essentially a function of what we consider to be of greatest ultimate value. Our worldview – including religious and ideologi-cal orientation  – determines which aspects of the human life and experience we attribute an intrinsic value to, meaning, a value that is not seen as a means to yet another greater end. Also, whether we approach the question from an individual or a societal perspective will point to different directions. Not surprisingly, no com-mon theoretical ground has been found on which to construct a generally accepted

‘neutral’ concept of quality of life. This frequently ignored circumstance prompted David Phillips to provocatively state that there are strictly speaking no ‘objective’ – in the sense of value-independent – measures of well-being and that it would be more accurate to refer instead to ‘collectively subjective’ measures (Phillips 2012), that is indicators, which possess more legitimacy because they have been estab-lished in a societal process.

5http://skos.ch/sozialhilfe-und-praxis/haeufig-gestellte-fragen/ (19.11.2014).

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Reviewing the spectrum of contemporary concepts of quality of life, several axes can be identified that shape the academic discussion surrounding it. The angle of measure, objective or subjective, is among the primary axes that have proven to be relevant (Noll 2004), transcending others such as the underlying moral philosophy or demarcations along disciplinary lines.

If we consider how these two measurement angles have been operationalized across disciplines, we find that global quality of life has most frequently been stud-ied from an objective angle by the indicators of longevity and income and subjec-tively by self-reports of happiness, satisfaction and pain (Gasper 2010). Within the latter approach, focusing on individuals’ own verdicts of well-being, two streams can be distinguished, eudaimonism and hedonism, both having emerged from ancient schools of thought.

Eudaimonism is central to Aristotelian ethics and has experienced a revival in the twentieth century under the term ‘human flourishing’ (Phillips 2012). ‘Virtue’ in an eudaimonic perspective is when something (or a person) performs the function well for which it was made. According to Aristotle, what is peculiar to human beings is their ability to reason; consequently, a life ‘worth living’ is one that is in accordance with reason (Nussbaum 1992). Assuming that only the individual person is in a legitimate position to determine the purpose for which she or he was made, the indicator used for assessing subjective well-being in an eudaimonic value system is the sense of fulfillment and the satisfaction with life (Athanassoulis 2010). Assessing the same life in terms of subjective well-being but according to a hedonistic outlook on life may come to very different conclusions: the hedonistic theories define hap-piness as ‘pleasure’ and posit that ‘pleasure’ and the ‘avoidance of pain’ – both, mental and physical – are the only things of ultimate importance (Phillips 2012).

Psychological research has brought forth considerable evidence that the under-standing of subjective well-being brought forth by these two philosophical schools are congruent with the complex ways in which humans experience their own well- being. In the realm of emotions and moods, the discovery that positive and negative affect are not simply opposite poles on one and the same dimension was path- breaking (Weijers 2011) as it implied that the overall subjective well-being was a composite construct with multiple dimensions (Bradburn 1969). In the 9070s, evi-dence was found for a cognitive evaluation of ‘life satisfaction’ that is distinct from the emotion of ‘happiness’ (Andrews and Withey 1976). The distinctiveness of pleasant and unpleasant affect and life satisfaction was confirmed by subsequent research with more sophisticated methods and proved to be especially significant for a longer time-frame (Weidekamp-Maicher 2008). However, the divide encoun-tered between different philosophical conceptions of ‘the good life’ has not been done away with in science. This is reflected in the fact that different streams of researchers dismiss parts of the components as irrelevant for global subjective well- being: for example, the validity of current mood states as indicators for subjective well-being is questioned because it disregards the vital contribution of having a meaningful purpose in life (Diener et  al. 1999). Others argue just the opposite, insisting that reports of current perception of an experience are the most reliable indicator of subjective well-being (Kahneman 2003). Moreover, even among those

3 Objectivity and Subjectivity

who in principle acknowledge the validity of these diverse measures there is contro-versy about whether subjective well-being is to be seen as a unitary construct or whether its various components should be treated as specific constructs, given that the correlation between the different components has proven to be weak (Kim- Prieto et al. 2013).

While psychologists’ main interest has been the experience of the individual, thus privileging what we have called the ‘perceived’ measurement angle, econo-mists are known to focus more on the objective angle, specifically on monetary indicators. This has not always been the case. The interest of economists in matters of quality of life can be traced back to the very beginnings of economic theorizing, more precisely, to the moral philosophy of utilitarianism at the end of the eighteenth and mid nineteenth century (Frey and Benz 2002). Its founding father, Jeremy Bentham, took it for granted that the assessment of ‘utility’ was not only shaped by but essentially consisted of subjective appraisals of well-being. He proposed to ori-ent and judge social policy as well as individual action according to the hedonistic maxim of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people’ (Alexander 2008). One of the core concerns of members of this school of thought was to make

‘happiness’ – defined as a mental state of pleasure – the object of a nuanced empiri-cal analysis by differentiating the different types of utility of which there existed

‘pleasure of sense, wealth, skill, amity, a good name, power, piety, benevolence, malevolence, memory, imagination, expectation, relief and the pleasures dependent on association’ (Bentham 1789/1996, p. 34–35 in Frey and Benz 2002, p. 5).

In the nineteenth century, economic thought on well-being distanced itself from hedonism⁶ and the psychological foundations of appraisal and embraced an increas-ingly positivist view of ‘utility’ (Robbins 1932/2007), defined by the ‘satisfaction of preferences’ that are observable objectively and no longer by the feeling this satis-faction evokes (Hausman 2013). The same axiom is used for deriving ‘social wel-fare’ from the consumption behavior of households (Frey and Stutzer 2002). In the 1970s, before the backdrop of a general dissatisfaction with GDP growth as sole indicator of societal progress, a surge of interest in alternative measures gave birth to what came to be known as the ‘social indicator movement’ (Duncan 1969, p. 1, in Land 2000, p. 2). The question of how objective and subjective measures relate to each other turned out to be a catalyst for the foundation of quality of life research as a discipline in its own right. The assumption that subjective well-being was a direct effect of observable circumstances led to an integration for psychological measures.

Behind this scientific curiosity was the hope that these scientifically defined non- monetary indicators of quality could serve to orient policy. However, the lack of empirical evidence for the relationship between objective and subjective indicators disillusioned those who had envisioned using subjective indictors as a measuring stick for the overall quality and evolution of a society (Weidekamp-Maicher 2008).

It was the economist Richard Easterlin who most famously expressed this perplexing

6 Some economists in the twenty-first century continue to argue in favor of hedonism but they remain the minority.

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finding: in the essay ‘Does economic growth improve the human lot?’ he found that increases in income only lead to temporary or small improvements in subjective well-being and general life satisfaction (Easterlin 1974). Since both measurement angles clearly represent different aspects of economic quality of life, something might be gained by looking at them in combination and paying attention to what the discrepancy could mean.

3.3 Incongruence Between Objective and Subjective