Capabilities And Happiness

Few would dispute that the well-being of individuals is one of the most desirable aims of human actions. However, approaches on how to define, measure, evaluate, and promote well-being differ widely. The conventional economic approach takes income (or the power to acquire market goods) as the most important indicator for well-being, and the utility function as the formal device for positive and normative analysis. However, this approach to well-being has been questioned for being seriously limited and other approaches have arisen. The capability approach to well-being, which has been developed during the last two decades by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and the Happiness Approach to well-being, championed by Richard Easterlin, both provide an alternative. Both approaches come from different traditions and have developed independently, but nevertheless aim to overcome the rigid boundaries of the conventional economic approach to well-being. Given these common aims, it is surprising that little comparative work has been undertaken across these approaches. This book aims to correct this by providing the reader with contributions from leading names associated with both approaches, as well as contributions which evaluate the approaches and contrast one with the other.

Approaches to well-being have been hotly debated across the social sciences, with most challenging the conventional economic approach which uses income as a key indicator of happiness. This volume compares and contrasts two such approaches, the Capability and Happiness Approach, via a series of interdisciplinary papers from top names in the field.

Offers a response to one of the oldest questions known to humankind namely, what is happiness and how can we ensure that communities are flourishing, happy places for people to live and work?

This book is about the relationship between different concepts of freedom and happiness, with implications for public policy.

This book is a collection of chapters on happiness and well-being. It includes contributions from scientists from all over the world, who present different, multifaceted, dialectically open perspectives and sensitivities regarding happiness. The authors discuss happiness and well-being from biological, biopsychosocial, anthropological, and philosophical points of view.

Social choice & the capability approach; issues of social vs collective agency; a rich discussion of key human development applications.

Romantic Capabilities discusses the relationship between popular new media uses of literary texts. Devising and modelling an original critical methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, this volume contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals medial capabilities of the text that can transform how we understand its significance for the original historical context for which it was created. Following an introductory theoretical chapter that explains the book's unconventional approach to the archive, Romantic Capabilities analyzes significant popular "media behaviors" exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake's pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and 3D photographers to Walter Scott's historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen's novels and their imaginary country estates. The result is a book that reveals Blake to be an important early theorist of viral media and the law, Scott's novels to be studies in vision that helped give rise to modern immersive media, and Austenian realism to be a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends. It offers insight into the politics of virality, the dependence of immersion on a sense of frame, and the extent to which eighteenth-century landscape gardening anticipated Deleuzian ideas of the "virtual" by granting existence to reality's as-yet-unrealized capabilities.

The capability approach to social justice construes a person's well-being in terms of the substantive freedoms people value. John Alexander engages with the rapidly growing body of literature on the capability approach in economics, inequality, poverty measurement and development studies. Critically assessing Sen and Nussbaum's work in normative economics, social ethics and political philosophy, Alexander develops a unified vision of the capability approach embodying the ideal of creating the greatest possible condition for the realization of basic capabilities for all. He then assesses this vision as a political theory arguing that capabilities are necessary but not sufficient for overcoming conditions of domination. The book calls for a more intimate relationship between individual liberty and the freedom of the political community as a whole.