Citations & Reference:"Heading into the Sumateran jungle on his first safari, the Chinese tourist was confident he could handle any emergency. He sidled up to the experienced native guide and said smugly, 'I know that carrying a torch will keep tigers away.''That’s true,' the guide replied. 'But it depends on how fast you carry the torch.'""Let's go on," said the Barista. "For most of the 20th century, the terms ‘welfare’ and ‘well-being’ were used more or less synonymously in discussions about human development, social justice and public policy. But in economics perspective, these words, 'welfare' and 'wellbeing,' have very different meanings.Welfare more commonly refers to the condition of an entire country or economy, which is sometimes emphasized by using the phrase 'social welfare.'Well-being, in simple terms, can be described as judging life positively and feeling good. For public health purposes, physical well-being (e.g., feeling very healthy and full of energy) is also viewed as critical to overall well-being. Well-being is usually used on persons or a group of people since it means the state of being healthy, happy, or prosperous. Healthcare workers are responsible for the health and well-being of all patients. Being accountable for your mistakes is a simple way to improve your well-being.From a philosophical perspective, well-being occupies a central role in ethics and political philosophy, including in major theories such as utilitarianism. It also extends far beyond philosophy: recent studies on the science and psychology of well-being have propelled the topic to center stage, and governments spend millions on promoting it. We are encouraged to adopt modes of thinking and behavior that support individual well-being or 'wellness'.Well-being has a long-distinguished history as a locus of philosophical exploration. This should come as no surprise. Much practical philosophy is focused on the questions of how we ought to live in general, what we ought to do, or what morality requires of us. But the answer to these questions must be sensitive to the question of how it would be best for us to live.To get well-being in focus, Guy Fletcher gives us an example. Suppose that you have a medical condition that has contaminated your blood and that can be cured in two different ways: receiving a blood donation or receiving a new kidney.As your friend, I am compelled to help. It turns out that I am a compatible donor for each of blood and kidney. Let us assume that you will be cured completely by either treatment (and that the risk of failure is identical in each case). Now let us look at the two options. Donating my kidney is much more painful and much more time-consuming. It also has a much longer recovery period. Donating blood, by contrast, is only slightly painful, takes hardly any time, and leaves me with two kidneys.In light of these facts, it seems that we can conclude that each option is equally good for you. By contrast, donating my kidney is much more costly to me than simply donating my blood. It is worse for me to donate my kidney than to lose some blood.The kind of value that we are thinking about when we try to determine whether the blood donation is better for me than the kidney donation is that of prudential value, of well-being, of how well my life goes for me. Another way to put the point is that the currency in which the blood donation is better for me than the kidney donation is the currency of my well-being.Fletcher then gives another illustration to get well-being in focus. You are 25 and you now face a choice between two different careers. You could be in a rock band or you could be a researcher into fundamental physics (your talents are diverse!). To get around the issue of uncertainty, let us suppose that we have the full facts about what those two lives would be like (but your memory will be wiped after making the choice).Suppose that the life in the rock band would be unbelievably fun. You would spend a lot of time playing music you love, you would spend time with your friends, you would see the world, attend all of the best parties, and visit far flung places. You would top the charts in every major country with your first album. However, despite once being extremely popular, your band would be a victim of changes in musical taste and so your career would be over at 40. Furthermore, the years of excess would take their toll and so you would experience five years of ill health before dying alone at 45.By contrast, life as a research scientist would be extremely intellectually rewarding. You would spend a lot of time thinking about and researching issues that are fundamental to the nature of the universe and that you therefore find extremely interesting. You would make discoveries about the fundamental nature of the universe, writing academic books whose influence, though modest, lasts for centuries. Your life would be comparatively solitary. You would have professional acquaintances with whom you are friendly but beyond your life partner and children you have few firm friends. However, your life would afford space for leisure time and for healthy habits and you would be active right up until your peaceful death at 70.These two lives are very different and we can evaluate them in lots of different ways. But focusing exclusively on their prudential value, on how good they would be for the person who lives them, which would you rather live? If you have difficulty answering this question, this reflects the difficulty of comparing these lives when it comes to well-being or prudential value. It is hard to decide how good each of these lives would be for the person who lives them and, thus, which would be better for them to live. The difficulty you are facing is the difficulty of determining how well each life goes, with respect to well-being.Some contemporary philosophers use 'happiness' to mean well-being, and some psychologists use 'subjective well-being' to mean happiness, says Neera K. Badhwar. However, most contemporary philosophers use 'happiness' to mean simply a positive psychological state (either dispositional or occurrent), and 'well-being' to mean a life that is good for the person living it.The fact that 'happiness' and 'well-being' are distinct concepts does not, however, mean that they are unrelated. Indeed, according to some philosophers, there is nothing more to a life of well-being than happiness: if your life is happy, you have well-being. On the other extreme, a few philosophers argue that we can have well-being without any happiness at all. Most philosophers, however, occupy the middle ground, arguing that happiness is essential to well-being, but not identical to it.Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard, Nattavudh Powdthavee, & George Ward, talk about 'What makes a happy adult? Does more money buy more happiness?' From their two surveys, they give an answer that, it does, but less than many people might think. There are two extreme views, both equally fallacious. On the one hand there are careless studies claiming that money makes no difference. This is certainly wrong, if we are talking about life-satisfaction as the outcome. On the other hand, there are millions of individuals who think that more money would totally change their well-being. For most people, this too is a delusion.The effect of income on happiness is in fact one of the best-measure effects in all happiness research, not because it is the most important determinant of well-being, but because so many people have for so long thought it was. Indeed some economists have taken 'full income' as equivalent to well-being.Happiness is not the same as income. But income does affect happiness. But how much extra life-satisfaction can extra income bring? The gain in happiness from an extra dollar of income varies greatly with income. In fact, the gain in happiness is inversely proportional to income. So when a poor person gets a dollar from someone who is ten times richer than him or her, the poor person gains ten times more happiness than the rich person loses. This so-called Diminishing Marginal Utility of Income was an article of faith in nineteenth-century economics and was a central argument for the redistribution of income. It is now substantiated by hard evidence, both across individuals and across countries.Education certainly raises income. Education is the route to a career, and that is a major reason for its importance. It benefits society, and society pays the educated individual for those benefits. education also provides more than just extra income to the person who is educated. It provides an interesting and potentially enjoyable experience for students; it educates people as citizens and voters; it generates higher tax payments; it reduces crime. And it provides for the individuals concerned a personal resource, interesting work, and additional capacity for enjoyment throughout their life.Crime is a problem, both for the criminal and for the community. For the criminal it can lead to social exclusion and a life that fails to satisfy. For the community, it reduces the quality of life. Why in our society some people commit crimes while others don’t? We can already predict to some extent who will commit crime later in life. It is those who have behavioral problems in early life, and to a lesser extent those who underperform academically. Poor intellectual performance also makes a conviction more likely. By contrast, children who are unhappy are less likely to become criminals—perhaps they lack the desire or energy needed for crime. Crime effects human well-being. These include effects on the individual criminal and effects on everybody else.Work is another factor of what makes a happy adult. Full-time workers spend at least a quarter of their waking life at work. But sad to say, on average, they enjoy that time less than anything else they do. The worst time of all is when they are with their boss. Even so, people hate it even more if they are unemployed.This is not just because they lose money from being out of work. They lose something even more precious—a sense of contributing, of belonging, and of being wanted. The pain caused by the experience of unemployment is one of the best-documented findings in all happiness research. Most unemployed people are struggling and less happy than when they were in work. For the same reason they become happier when they get back to work.If unemployment hurts, do you get used to it after a while so that it becomes less painful? The answer is No. Unemployment reduce life satisfaction. unemployment causes pain not only at the time but also to a lesser extent over the years that follow, even after the person is back in work.When jobs are scarce, this makes some people unemployed; but it also creates fear and uncertainty for many more people, even if they currently have work. In consequence, when unemployment rises in a region, this reduces the lifesatisfaction of the employed population in the region.At the same time, for those who are unemployed, a high unemployment rate reduces their sense of shame at being unemployed, and it also expands the social group with whom they can interact. Does this help? The answer is 'yes,' it helps but not by much. But what determines which individuals become unemployed? The main issue is to explain who has a history of unemployment, not who is unemployed at a particular moment. But do people enjoy their work? Only recently has social science shown how little most people do in fact enjoy their work, compared with many other activities.Another factor that related to adult happiness is building a family. Most people want a partner, and most want at some time to have children. Are they right, in terms of what will bring them satisfaction and fulfillment? These are important issues for any form of public policy that aims to support people in achieving a good life. Life-course data provide important evidence on all this. They show decisively the importance of close personal relationships to a satisfying life. When it comes to children, the answer is more nuanced.'What do you most desire in life?' Many people say physical and mental health. Physical pain is one of the worst of all human experiences—bodily torture being an extreme case. And mental pain is as bad as most physical pain, and very similar—it is experienced in the same brain areas as the affective components of physical pain. Indeed mental illness is the most common cause of suicide.So both mental illness and physical illness are major causes of human wretchedness. But many existing studies of life-satisfaction ignore mental illness. Implicitly they assume that misery and mental illness are the same thing. This is quite wrong. Many things can cause low life-satisfaction, some of them directly and others indirectly by causing mental illness. But there are also sources of mental illness that are uncorrelated with any of the obvious external causes like poverty, unemployment, separation, or bereavement.Social norms and institutions are public goods that affect all individuals living in a society. So we can study their effects only by comparing life-satisfaction across societies, rather than across individuals. The simplest thing is to compare different nations.Countries differ in many ways apart from income and health. Perhaps the most important of these are in their: ethical norms of behavior (including trustworthiness, generosity, and so on); networks of social support ('bonding capital'); openness and tolerance ('bridging capital'); personal freedom; the quality of government (including corruption); equality, and levels of religiosity.Good behavior consists of 'do’s' as well as 'don’ts.' It is crucially important what positive things we do for each other. People are happier in societies where people behave well.Different from ethical norms are the social structures that give people a sense of belonging, and of having others they can rely on for support. What people most enjoy is socializing with friends—there is little worse than being friendless.But in any multicultural or multiclass society there is something else that is also critical. That is bridging capital. In most societies, people who belong to minorities, including ethnic minorities and migrants, are on average less happy than the rest of the community. One reason why migrants are unhappy is of course that they are separated from many of their family and friends—they lack bonding capital. But too often they are also second-class citizens in the place they have moved to—they lack bridges.Closely related to tolerance is the issue of freedom—the willingness of society to let people lead their lives as they wish, provided they do no harm to others. We are not talking here about the organization of government nor about economics, but about the freedom of individuals in their daily lives to choose their own way of life. This includes, for example, to choose where to live, and to speak your mind. More freedom is always better, ceteris paribus. But in practice, more freedom may sometimes mean less social cohesion. There is therefore a balance to be struck.Much research has shown that for the personal wellbeing of the population, it is the quality of government that is the more important. It is that which impinges on peoples’ daily lives. Across countries, democracy is of course correlated with the quality of government. But there are some states that are high on quality but low on democracy.Revolutionaries everywhere have demanded liberty, equality, and fraternity. Equality directly influences the quality of interpersonal relations in a society. More equal societies tend to have more trust, better health, and so on—at all levels of society. This implies some kind of atmospheric effect.The conclusion should probably be this: an ethos of mutual respect and care is crucial for a happy society. Such an ethos will be highly correlated with trust, low corruption, good social support, effective government—and greater equality of income. The priority is therefore to improve the whole ethos of a society and not simply to equalize income.Thus, what about religion? The issue of religion, can play at least three major roles: to instill values, to offer comfort, and to provide valuable social interaction.The last thing that makes a happy adult is happiness at older age. As people move from middle into older ages, their circumstances and experiences change in many ways. Most people retire; their children leave home and establish independent lives; physical and cognitive capacities decline; and the experience of the death and loss of loved ones becomes more common. These changes influence financial resources, social relationships, independence, and autonomy. At the same time, people who no longer feel bound by the constraints of middle age may find fresh opportunities as they age, together with relief from many important sources of stress. All these processes mean that the determinants of satisfaction with life may change with ageing, or at least that the relative importance of the various sources of life-satisfaction may shift as we grow older."Wulandari said, 'My time is up. I have to go." The Barista then said, 'Finally, as a closing, well-being and personality or character are the two most basic(and deeply inter-connected) dimensions by which people understand and judge themselves and others. How good or successful we are depends on who we are (character) and what sort of life we have (well-being).The definition of well-being sees life as active. Only valuable activities contribute to our well-being. People's well-being depends not only on themselves; it requires that conditions which make their activities possible, and give them their meaning, obtain. And to obtain it, people must work hand in hand, not separately. Well-being cannot be achieved individually, but collectively. And Allah knows best.'"Time to go, the Barista waved and hummed,But if you look at me closelyYou will see it in my eyesThis girl will always find her way *)
- Annete Moldvaer, The Coffee Book, 2021, Penguin Random House
- Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History, 2019, Reaktion Books Ltd
- William H. Ukers, All About Coffee, 2012, F+W Media, Inc.
- Scott Rao, The Professional Barista's Handbook, 2008, Scott Rao
- Sebastien Rachneux, Coffee Isn't Rocket Science, 2016, Black Bull
- Guy Fletcher, The Philosophy of Well-Being: An Introduction, 2016, Routledge
- Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy of Well-Being, 2016, Routledge
- Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard, Nattavudh Powdthavee, & George Ward, The Origin of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being over the Life Course, 2018, Princeton University Press
- Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics, 1996, Clarendon Press
*) "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" written by Max Martin, Rami Yacoub, and Dido Armstrong
[Session 2][Session 1]
