WELL-BEING, James Karoor

Variously interpreted as living and faring well or flourishing, the notion of well being is intricately bound up with our ideas about what constitutes human happiness and the sort of life it is good to lead. Well being is said to be both a condition of good life and what the good life achieves. However , the phrase the good life is ambiguous between the morally good life and the sort of life people aspire to, a life in which comfort and enjoyment have a large part. Indeed we may even suspect that the two sort of life are mutually exclusive and the well being belongs firmly in the latter, or would be a surprising central future of the former. It seems that ambiguity can atleast be taken as an indication of how unclear the connection between being morally good and possessing health, wealth, and happiness, and the other components of well being. Some philosophers have, nevertheless objected to the suggested dichotomy between what is morally good and what is morally enjoyable. Aristotle, for example insists in his discussion of eudemonia that the morally good life is essential to human flouring and, conversely, that being is possible only for a person who has well being. Thus, according to this view, well being is a notion which spans both the moral and non moral aspects of life. It follows that any adequate conception of a good life canot be limited to either a narrowly moral or non moral, account. Furthermore, because a good person cannot enjoy well being in conditions of poverty or oppression, it is clear that well being is also political notion. It must therefore explicated in both political and moral terms, with the focused of interest placed firmly on the independence of these. While common sense accords within this view of the matter, the notion of well being tented to be the subject of much dispute, and prey to the conflicting conception of what enables human beings to flourish which are provided by different moral and political philosophies.  The question of distribution of well being will then be essentially a matter of social justice. Since it is hard to justify the inequalities of well being even when it seems possible to justify the inequalities of socioeconomic goods, the question will be best answer, perhaps, by some principle of equality which gives priority to policies whose end is to make well- off those who are badly off in terms of well being.