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13 - Happiness and Well-Being

from Part II - Aspects of Ethical Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Edward F. Fischer  and
Sam Victor
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Since the late 1990s, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’, a field of study long dominated by moral philosophers, social psychologists, and welfare economists. This chapter reviews anthropological approaches to happiness and well-being, and their engagement with ideas from virtue ethics, value theory, and capabilities approaches to development. Across a range of ethnographic cases in which the concepts have been applied as well as from which analogous concepts have been drawn, we highlight the analytical tension between (a) a search for objective measures that can be used to guide efforts aimed at increasing well-being and reducing global inequities and (b) the exploration of cultural worlds in which different peoples conceive of and pursue ‘the good life’ in varied and sometimes incommensurate ways. This multidisciplinary analytical field has been productive for anthropological theory, but scepticism remains around the implications of its evaluative impulses and ambitions.

Keywords

happinesswell-beingvirtue ethicsvaluescapabilities approachinternational developmentthe goodaspirationfutures
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 335 - 358
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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