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ОглавлениеThe thin and the thick of need and needing
This chapter will:
•develop a discussion of what may be called ‘thin’ needs, connecting them with ‘hedonic’ philosophical ideas of well-being;
•develop a discussion of what may be called ‘thick’ needs, connecting them with ‘eudaimonic’ philosophical ideas of well-being;
•consider, in light of these discussions, competing conceptions of human beings’ need for ‘dignity’ on the one hand and ‘care’ on the other.
This chapter will introduce more fully the particular distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ conceptions of human need first touched upon in Chapter 1.
The distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’
The distinction we have drawn between thin and thick interpretations of need and needing is similar to that once made by Kate Soper (1993). And it is related in a more general sense to distinctions between absolute and relative need; between basic and ‘higher’ needs; between vital needs and agency needs; between procedural and substantive definitions of need; or between what people need to survive as opposed to what they need to flourish. But the distinction we are making here also resonates with that which ethnographic anthropologists make between thin and thick descriptions of human life (for example, Geertz, 1973). We should not assume that thick interpretations are always better than thin ones: they may be richer, subtler, more complex, but will not necessarily result in just outcomes, and they are no less likely than other interpretations to be misguided. Michael Walzer (1994) draws on the same idea to distinguish between thin and thick moralities. He makes it clear that, in a pluralistic world, thin (or ‘minimalist’) moralities are important not because they necessarily lay the foundations for thicker (or ‘maximalist’) moralities, but for the contribution they make to different forms of human understanding and the pragmatic possibilities they create for agreed action among people with different moral beliefs. Insofar as there clearly is a moral dimension to understandings of human need, this captures one of the ways in which we can consider the plurality of meanings attaching to concepts of need.
The meaning this book is seeking to bring to the distinction between thin and thick can most helpfully be achieved by linking it to yet another concept connected to human need; that of human well-being. There is a distinction to be made between being ‘well enough’ and being ‘very well’. To be well enough is to be satisfied with what you can have and do in life. To be very well is, perhaps, to be ‘truly’ fulfilled as a human being. To be ‘not well’ implies some kind of deprivation. Significantly, of course, one can’t be ‘excessively well’: that would be a contradiction in terms. The notion of well-being is capable of invoking not just practical, but moral or ethical considerations about the extent and the limits of human need; not only a ‘thin’ conception of what the lives of human beings necessarily do entail, but also a ‘thick’ conception of what a human life ought to, or potentially could, entail. Needing equates on the one hand with existing and on the other with being: that is to say, it has both existential and ontological meaning. Needing equates on the one hand to what a human being requires to lead a tolerable or even contented life in the social and environmental context in which she finds herself and on the other what she might need to live a reflexive and purposeful life. And different meanings – as will be seen – can have different implications for priorities and judgements when it comes to the recognition of substantive needs.
One recent introductory textbook has defined academic social policy as the study of human well-being or, more particularly, the social relations and systems that promote or impair human well-being (H. Dean, 2019: 1). ‘Well-being’, though hardly a new concept, has become yet another in a succession of fashionable, insightful, yet slippery concepts relevant to human need (for example, Gough & McGregor, 2007; Jordan, 2008; B. Searle, 2008). The advantage of well-being as a term is that it can turn our attention to the positive aspects of social policy, as opposed to negative aspects relating to the management of social problems. It is untainted by the pejorative connotation that attaches in certain quarters to the term ‘welfare’ (Daly, 2011). It also places the emphasis on human ‘being’ as opposed to ‘having’ or ‘doing’ (Fromm, 1976). It has been acknowledged nonetheless by Gough and McGregor that ‘wellbeing is still a novel category in applied social science, such that no settled consensus on its meaning has yet emerged’ (2007: 5). Well-being can be defined in relation to its opposite, depending on just how the opposite is conceived. Gough and McGregor (2007) define well-being as the opposite of ‘ill-being’ or poverty. Jordan (2008) goes so far as to define it as the opposite of ‘welfare’ in the sense attributed to the term within neo-liberal discourse: well-being he sees as the realisation of what he terms ‘social value’; welfare as the realisation of individual utility. Taylor (2018) similarly juxtaposes utilitarian notions of subjective well-being with relational or intersubjective notions of well-being. These suggestions illustrate the distinction that I am characterising as that between thin and thick conceptions of human need.
This brings us to the essence of the fundamental distinction between the ‘hedonic’ and the ‘eudaimonic’. The etymological origins of these two terms are to be found in classical Greek philosophy. Hedonism was concerned with pleasure; eudaimonia with spiritual well-being (see Box 3.1). The Socratic tradition recognised both, but the traditions have diverged. The Epicureans supposed that a good life entailed a justly moderated pursuit of aesthetic pleasure (mental as well as physical) and practical avoidance of pain or discomfort (see T. Fitzpatrick, 2018). Aristotle (c. 350 bce) contended that leading a good or ethical life means more than pleasure-seeking; it entails a quest for virtue and the self-realisation that comes through social engagement, civic duty and creative activity (see also Fitzpatrick, 2008: Ch. 4; MacIntyre, 2007). It has been attempted elsewhere (H. Dean, 2008b) to argue that the hedonic-eudaimonic distinction is reflected in the different ways in which post-Western Enlightenment concepts of citizenship and associated approaches in social policy have been constructed. This chapter will extend that argument further.
Box 3.1: The etymological roots of the word eudaimonia
Historically speaking, the word ‘daimon’ (or its derivatives, such as daemon or demon) has referred:
•either to what might be called a person’s own ‘soul’ or their true or ‘noumenal’ self;
•or else to an independent ‘spirit’ - whether good or bad – for example, a guardian angel on the one hand or an evil incubus on the other.
During the last few hundred years, it is this last-mentioned imagery – of the evil demon – that has tended to hold sway. However, in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ children’s book trilogy (Northern Lights [1995], The Subtle Knife [1997] and The Amber Spyglass [2000], published by Scholastic Ltd.) each of the human characters to be found living in a fictional world, parallel to our own, has a ‘daemon’ in the form of an animal familiar. Such daemons reflect or embody the noumenal self of the person to whom they are uniquely attached. They are essential to the integrity of that person as a human being and accompany her or him throughout that person’s life. This is a contemporary example of a way of imagining our daimonic existence.
The prefix ‘eu’ implies ‘wellness’ or ‘goodness’ and so exposes the supposed ‘spiritual’ dimension of our human existence to moral judgement as to the nature of human virtue. Axiomatically, this frames the person in her social context. Through the concept of eudaimonia this book will not concern itself with the many religious interpretations of spiritual well-being, but with secular interpretations bearing upon the social context through which personal identity and the human ‘self’ are ethically or morally constituted.
We are seeking here to drive the analysis deeper. Recalling Titmuss’ assertion (cited in Chapter 1) that no division can be made between ‘individual’ and ‘social’ need, the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ need that we explore in this chapter embraces the axiomatic connectedness of the individual and the social, while nevertheless examining differences in conceptual emphasis. That which is thin and hedonically conceptualised is focused upon individual subjective experiences of needing. That which is thick and eudaimonically conceptualised is focused on the relational and intersubjective context of needing.
Thin needs and hedonic notions of well-being
Mention was made in Chapter 1 of everyday ‘moralistic’ and ‘economistic’ meanings that may attach to human needs. As to the former, these are premised at root on the ‘thin’ morality characterised by Hobbes’ (1651) notion of society as a ‘war of all against all’ and the minimum necessary restraints that should be imposed upon the freedom of the individual in pursuit of her own hedonic well-being. At their most extreme, such meanings may become fundamentally asocial and/or misanthropic. They imply that a failure to achieve self-sufficiency and to meet one’s own needs is morally blameworthy (for example, Smiles, 1859). Understandings of this nature, which may in practice marginalise human need, have a residual influence within social policy; an influence that may gather in significance with the global rise of right-wing populism (Grayling, 2017; and see discussion of ‘supremacist humanism’ in Chapter 2).
As to economistic meanings, we shall see in Chapter 4 that if the human being is regarded as a utilitarian subject or as a market actor her needs may be understood in terms of her objective interests or her subjective preferences, respectively (and see also the discussion of ‘liberal-individualist humanism’ in Chapter 2). These are ‘thin’ understandings in the sense that the human being is abstractly construed as a calculative actor with, at best, incidental regard for her inner feelings or her social identity. Such understandings are premised on assumptions about the nature of utility on the one hand and of human happiness on the other.
From utilitarianism to welfarism
The hedonic approach to human well-being found expression in the 19th century in English utilitarianism. And utilitarianism found its clearest expression in the work of Jeremy Bentham. As Hobsbawm has put it, arithmetic was the fundamental tool of the era and for Bentham and his followers, particularly:
Happiness was the object of policy. Every man’s pleasure could be expressed … as a quantity and so could his pain. Deduct the pain from the pleasure and the net result was his happiness. Add the happiness of all men and deduct the unhappiness, and that government which secured the greatest happiness for the greatest number was the best. (Hobsbawm, 1968: 79)
Such a calculus could by implication justify inflicting disutility (that is, pain) upon any who threatened the happiness of the majority. So it was that in England a Benthamite approach to social policy resulted in the creation of the Victorian workhouse and the principle of ‘lesser eligibility’ (D. Fraser, 2017). The workhouse was deliberately contrived to be a place of wholesome horror compared even to the hardships endured by the poorest self-sufficient labourer. None but the most desperate would seek relief on such terms. In this way the pressure upon the destitute to be self-sufficient was maximised, and the cost of Poor Rates (a tax borne by property owners) was minimised. The misery of the pauper would promote the greater happiness of the population in general (and property owners in particular).
This represents a draconian illustration of utilitarian or ‘consequentialist’ (for example, H. Bochel et al, 2005: 197–8; Fitzpatrick, 2008) social policy. Nonetheless, it encapsulates founding elements of a ‘welfarist’ approach that continues more widely to inform social policy (Jordan, 2008). Welfarism here is taken to refer to a particular kind of thinking that assumes that social policy intervention should be judged by its aggregate effects, rather than the well-being of any particular individual. It is also premised upon certain assumptions about what motivates people: pleasures or rewards provide incentives; pain or punishment provide disincentives. Policy may be used to induce or to reinforce the behaviour most likely to generate beneficial overall outcomes (see, for example, Baddeley, 2017; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008).
The global North in the 20th century witnessed the emergence of welfare states that began to make systematic provision for meeting ‘welfare’ needs, including healthcare, education, housing and social security. But rights to welfare came with strings attached. Entitlement to various kinds of welfare were and can still be subject to the good character, the good behaviour or the healthy lifestyles of recipients; or expressly conditional upon the recipients’ participation in training or work experience, or upon ensuring their children attend school. The extension of state administration into the field of welfare extended its capacity to control people’s lives in the cause of the greater good (Garland, 1981), a development that with the development of Conditional Cash Transfers now extends to parts of the global South (Leisering & Barrientos, 2013).
As we shall see in Chapter 4, the political calculus of utilitarianism has its counterpart in welfare economics, which has attempted to bring neo-classical economics to bear upon the analysis of human well-being; and the principles of cost-effectiveness analysis to bear in public policy making. This has, for example, been especially relevant in healthcare policy, especially when new treatments are generated by technological and medical advances, giving rise to what has been called ‘technical need’ (Forder, 1974). But the cost of such innovation may exceed the resources available. When public access to life-saving procedures is to be rationed, difficult decisions have to be taken.
The best known example of how this might be done is the system of QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) developed amid some controversy in Oregon, US (and once considered for use in the UK) (H. Bochel et al, 2005: 203; A. Williams, 2005). QALYs can be used to evaluate whether the cost of surgery or some other form of healthcare intervention is justified; whether a person’s life is ‘good enough’ to be worth saving. They indicate the length of time a patient can expect to achieve an acceptable quality of life as a result of treatment, however, the measure of quality of life – the Rosser Index – is a classic example of a hedonic calculus. It evaluates degrees of disability in one dimension (ranging from ‘none’ to a ‘state of unconsciousness’) and degrees of distress in another (ranging from ‘none’ to ‘severe’) in order to compute a matrix score (ranging from 1.0 for ‘healthy’ to 0.0 for ‘dead’) (Gudex, 1986; Kind et al, 1982). Underpinning these approaches and associated debates in medical ethics lie fundamental questions regarding the ‘value’ of human life, not least where, for example, this extends to judgements about abortion, embryo research, euthanasia and assisted dying (Harris, 1985). Where such judgements are not driven by religious convictions, they appear within medical circles to draw upon empiricist conception attributed to Locke, who contended that personhood requires no more than that the individual ‘can consider itself the same thinking thing in different times and places’ (Locke, 1689), from which Harris concludes that for ethical purposes a person whose right to life must be respected ‘will be any being capable of valuing its own existence’ (1985: 18), a definition which Harris concedes might apply not exclusively to human beings, but potentially to alien life forms or intelligent machines! Most significantly for our purposes, however, this is a definition that restricts the understanding of human consciousness to the sensibility of an individual being and implies what is here defined as a ‘thin’ understanding of needing and of the human condition.
Hedonic approaches to well-being have informed a succession of health-related quality of life measures that have in the first instance related wellness primarily to healthiness (Phillips, 2006: Ch. 2). But the utility or quality of life may be judged not simply in terms of healthy life expectancy, but happy life expectancy (Veenhoven, 1996).
The study of happiness
The ideal generally espoused by welfare economists has been that the optimal distribution of goods necessary for well-being is best achieved under conditions of sustained economic growth and general affluence. In this way, everyone can be happy (provided they keep healthy). At any particular point in time there is a positive correlation between a person’s happiness and her income (Di Tella & MacCullough, 2007), but there is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that economic growth does not necessarily promote additional happiness. In many countries, rising Gross National Product (GNP) does not correlate with increased well-being (Layard, 2011; B. Searle, 2008). The tiny, predominantly Buddhist, nation of Bhutan has decided it will no longer try to measure its success in terms of GNP, but GNH (Gross National Happiness) (see www.bhutanstudies.org.bt). Elsewhere, however, what has been called the ‘Easterlin paradox’ (crudely, that extra money doesn’t always buy extra happiness) has become something of a preoccupation (Easterlin, 2005).
In recent years various kinds of social scientist have turned their minds to the measurement of happiness, life-satisfaction, personal or subjective well-being. It is possible to measure such things by asking people to say how happy they feel, how satisfied they are with their lives, or to answer a battery of health-related questions to establish how ‘well’ they feel (mentally as well as physically). Whereas ‘objective’ measures of well-being might draw on indicators such as wealth or poverty statistics (as we shall see in Chapter 7), welfare economists are now interested in ‘subjective’ well-being. They have concluded that people’s replies to such simple questions as ‘How do you feel about life as a whole?’ are generally a good predictor of subjective well-being (Andrews & Withey, 1976; Deeming, 2013; Dolan & Metcalfe, 2012; B. Searle, 2008; Stiglitz et al, 2009).
There has been something of a hegemonic movement within the policy-making establishment favouring the use of subjective well-being metrics and, within academic social policy, of concepts such as Social Happiness, which is the title of a book by (the perhaps aptly named) Neil Thin (2012). Thin suggests that a ‘happiness lens’ may be brought to bear in social policy in ways that promote empathy, positivity, holism, a lifespan perspective and transparency (2012: xiv). Uplifting as this sounds, it may be argued that a happiness lens could become rose-tinted spectacles that focus on the importance of positive affect rather than substantive effects upon human well-being. Thin bemoans the ‘happiness-sized hole in policy processes and academic discourse’ (p 7), but while he is right to call for more attention to the way people feel, it is significant that enduring sources of unhappiness – for example sickness, bereavement, poverty or homelessness – do not appear even as topics in the index of his book.
It was Inglehart (1990) who first identified a cultural shift to what he called ‘post-materialism’. As advanced industrial societies became more affluent, he observed, the preoccupations of their inhabitants begin to change. As material scarcity declines people become more individualistic and introspectively preoccupied (see also U. Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). Evidence from a variety of sources, including the World Values Survey, tended to indicate that as economic growth and personal incomes rose across the developed world, empirical measures of ‘happiness’, life-satisfaction and subjective well-being had stalled. However, it is important to note: first, that the variation in happiness ‘scores’ within countries was less than that between countries, underlining the extent to which cultures are highly context specific; second, that recent time series data suggest that while overall trend in happiness levels in many of the most affluent countries has indeed been largely flat or sometimes downward over the course of the past half-century, there has been improvement in recent years. What is more, in a majority of countries – including rapidly developing countries, such as India and China, where living standards for some citizens have still to rise – the overall trend has been one of rising happiness (Inglehart et al, 2008; 2014). The trends are complex, and interpretations of aggregated data of this nature are, inevitably, contestable (see, for example, Burchardt, 2006b).
There remain well-established doubts, for example, as to the social sustainability of continuous economic growth (Hirsch, 1977); as to whether success within a perennially competitive economic environment may fuel a culture of corrosive anxiety at the level of the individual actor (Pahl, 1995); and as to whether affluence undermines general well-being (Galbraith, 1958; Offer, 2006). The economist Richard Layard (2011) has joined those who claim that riches do not bring happiness. His analysis and prescriptions are described by Jordan (2008) as neo-utilitarian in nature. Layard draws his definition of happiness from the post-Western Enlightenment liberal tradition, explicitly rejecting any eudaimonic dimension (2011: 22). He concludes that we should monitor GNP and GNH together; that we should constrain the effects of excessive inequality, exploitative work cultures and rampant consumerism; that (in the UK) we should spend more on mental health provision. But he seeks nonetheless to maximise the sum of utility and to contain the process within the parameters of a cost-effectiveness analysis. He favours the retention of welfare-to-work sanctions and the extension of moral education in schools. The implication is that with better understanding, we can make more people happier.
Psychologists in particular have investigated happiness and have made a substantial contribution to the methodological development of the subjective well-being measures mentioned earlier. We shall return to discuss psychological theories of need in Chapter 4, but there are traditions within psychology whose roots lie in medicine and biology and are concerned with the well-being of an essentially asocial human organism (Stenner & Taylor, 2008). From a hedonic perspective, the incidence of mental ill-health – clinical depression, for example – may be acknowledged as a consequence of the stress of coping with the tribulations of a life in which pleasure may be hard to achieve and pain hard to avoid (Frost & Hoggett, 2008). Welfare economists and hedonic psychologists can agree on certain kinds of explanation. To the extent that increasing levels of material consumption and wealth do not necessarily enhance subjective well-being this may be understood in terms of the decreasing marginal utility of additional consumption on the one hand and the effects of the ‘hedonic treadmill’ on the other (Offer, 2006). People adapt to rising living standards to the point that they no longer find them satisfying. And keeping up with the Joneses can be unsatisfying, exhausting or depressing. The utilitarian arithmetic alluded to by Hobsbawm gets more difficult. As Beverley Searle has put it, subjective well-being ‘is an entanglement of experiences, a process with no beginning and no end’ (B. 2008: 104).
Happiness can be elusive, and Tania Burchardt has suggested that though social scientific investigators of happiness might be ‘barking up the right tree’, they might be doing so ‘in the wrong neck of the woods’: ‘the goal of social policy should be actual well-being, not just the cosy sensation of well-being’ (2006b: 157).
Thick needs and eudaimonic notions of well-being
Mention was made in Chapter 1 of everyday ‘socially reformist’ and ‘paternalistic’ meanings that can attach to human needs. Both kinds of meaning may in some way connect with ‘thicker’ conceptions of need and the eudaimonic elements of human well-being. What I have caricatured as socially reformist meanings have roots in an acknowledgement that though human beings may individually be economic actors, they are also necessarily social beings. The roots of such meanings may therefore lie in an either implicit or explicit form of reformist solidaristic humanism (see discussion in Chapter 2). Paternalistic meanings may have roots – once again, implicitly or explicitly – in a more conservative form of solidaristic humanism, and a compassionate (possibly religiously inspired) rather than an authoritarian moral concern for the needs of weaker or wayward members of society. We shall consider briefly some of the philosophical underpinnings that may attach to such meanings, but also some more recent thinking about what social well-being entails.
Philosophical underpinnings: in search of the good life
The Aristotelian conception of the ‘good life’ provides not necessarily a constitutive foundation, but the beginnings of a pathway or pathways leading to eudaimonic conceptions of human well-being. While the hedonic pathway led to utilitarianism, the eudaimonic approach has led in different directions. Elements of the approach translated themselves during the 18th century onwards into Kantian ‘deontological ethics’ (Kant, 1785); that is to say, into notions of universal moral duty and the contention that not only does everybody have a right to well-being, but nobody should be treated as a means of achieving happiness for another. Such thinking opened the door to the social liberalism that informed the creation of modern welfare states; to socially liberal conceptions of social justice, such as that espoused by Rawls; and, for example, to Sen’s capability approach (both of which we shall discuss in Chapter 4).
The principal critique of the social liberal approach came from a variety of radical democrats or ‘left-communitarians’ (for example, MacIntyre, 2007; Sandel, 1982; Walzer, 1983) who can in various ways trace their thinking back to the Aristotelian tradition, and in particular to the idea that human knowledge and governance are fundamentally social or collective enterprises. Their objection was to the abstract nature of the individual ‘self’ that is posed in liberal deontology as opposed to a presumption that the mutual obligations human beings owe to each other are grounded in the realities of their social belonging. This particular brand of communitarianism has much in common with the republicanism of Rousseau and Montesquieu, and embodies tendencies, at least, to social conservatism. Post-Enlightenment republicanism favoured the Aristotelian rather than the Platonic tradition in that it envisaged a republic governed not by philosopher kings, but by the general will of the people. The republican approach was by implication more eudaimonic. It assumed that human relations amount to a collaboration between vulnerable but cooperative beings; that dealings between people entail various forms of interpersonal attachment or belonging.
Social liberalism and social conservatism each potentially, therefore, embody a eudaimonic interpretation of the good life: the former premised more on abstract philosophical doctrine; the latter more on a concern for cultural norms. The former, as it evolved, became increasingly associated with the politics of social democracy, with its emphasis on promoting social justice. The latter, as it evolved, became increasingly associated with the politics of Christian democracy with its emphasis on preserving the traditional social order. Both, however, attached some value to solidarity and the idea that there is virtue in sharing risks and responsibilities. For example, social liberalism and social conservatism have each embraced social insurance and/or social protection principles (which will be further discussed in Chapter 7). Forms of social provision premised on social insurance or universalistic social protection entail solidaristic notions of risk-sharing: they are consistent with a ‘eudaimonic ethic’ (a concept to which we shall return in Chapter 9). They imply ostensibly a concern that human society should do more than abate or avoid the suffering of its members, but enable them, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the life-course, to participate and to flourish.
The development of various ‘modern’ forms of welfare state during the second half of the 20th century (Esping-Andersen, 1990) was made possible by uneasy compromises between different strands of social liberalism and social conservatism: compromises that laid the foundations of contemporary understandings of social policy and the basis for ‘thicker’ understandings of human need. However, the consensus around which such compromises were formed proved vulnerable to a resurgence of utilitarian thinking and economic individualism that crystallised at the global level as the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson, 1990): an alternative consensus that has since the end of the 20th century informed a degree of welfare state retrenchment across the global North and an approach to developmental aid for the global South that largely favoured a hedonic calculus of free trade, mitigated by welfare safety nets (B. Deacon, 2007). Nevertheless, UN agencies such as the International Labour Organisation have continued to favour insurance-based or universal social security and the evolution of a ‘Social Protection Floor’ (ILO, 2006; 2012), while the World Health Organization – in contrast to the Rosser Index mentioned earlier – has sought to define and to monitor Quality of Life in broadly eudaimonic terms, as:
an individual’s perceptions of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live, and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns. It is a broad ranging concept affected in a complex way by the person’s physical health, psychological state, level of independence, social relationships and their relationship to salient features of their environment. (World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL) Group, 1995: 495; and see discussion in Schmidt & Bullinger, 2008)
Social quality, social value and relationality
A ‘quality of life’ concept (Phillips, 2006) can clearly therefore include a social dimension, and this is explicitly espoused in the concept of ‘social quality’ contained in a declaration by a group of academics – The Amsterdam Declaration on the Social Quality of Europe – issued in 1997. The concept was intended to capture the intention expressed in Jacques Delors’ call for a social dimension to the European Union and to establish a dialogue or dialectique between economic and social policy concerns (W. Beck et al, 1997). Social quality was to be a multidimensional concept, through which to evaluate European citizens’ enjoyment of economic security (as a matter of social justice), social inclusion (through forms of participation), social cohesion (by way of social recognition) and personal empowerment (from the exercise of compassion and social responsiveness). The theoretical and empirical development of the concept was furthered by the European Foundation on Social Quality, which in 2013 became the International Association of Social Quality (www.socialquality.org) and now defines social quality as ‘the extent to which people are able to participate in social relationships under conditions which enhance their well-being, capacity and individual potential’. This ‘new vision’ is focused on the objective, subjective and normative conditions of life around the world. The theoretical elaboration of the social quality concept has become somewhat complex (Baers et al, 2005; van der Maesen & Walker, 2012). The components of social quality have been conceptualised in relation to ‘tensions’ between macro and micro level concerns on the one hand and between the organisational and the community level on the other. Each of these tensions have been conceptualised in part through Jürgen Habermas’ (1987) celebrated distinction between system and life-world, and this common influence is reflected in a certain amount of conflation within the modelling process. As presented, social quality is not of itself a unitary concept. Nevertheless, the analysis resonates in certain respects with the approach to human need developed in this book. We shall touch again on the social quality model in Chapter 6.
Another alternative approach to social well-being has been provided through Bill Jordan’s notion of ‘social value’ (2008). This concept is more vaguely specified yet more encompassing than that of social quality. Jordan’s argument is that the ascendancy of an economic model of welfare represented by the Washington Consensus, the marketisation of public service delivery and the promotion of self-provisioning – especially in the Anglophone countries – have crowded out the socially valuable personal relationships, the trust and the participation that sustain the quality of people’s lives. Economic theory, he argues, reinterprets and remoulds the functioning of social institutions and cultural traditions as if they are contracts for individual utility maximisation. Utility becomes ‘a single calculus, and a single currency for exchange’ (p 62). In this context Jordan advances his own critique of the increasingly hegemonic concept, social capital (Field, 2003). Social capital theory blames the Easterlin paradox (see earlier) on deficiencies of social capital, whereas Jordan blames it on the destruction of social value. Social value is presented as an alternative to social capital, and the source of human well-being. There are resonances between Jordan’s arguments and those of other thinkers referred to at various stages throughout this book, including Marx, Baudrillard, Honneth and Douglas (who we shall specifically consider in a moment).
Another multidimensional and multidisciplinary conceptual framework addressed to well-being in a global context was developed by the ESRC Well-being in Developing Countries Research Group at the University of Bath. Their framework rested on five ‘key ideas’: 1) The centrality of social human being; 2) Harm and needs; 3) Meaning, culture and identity; 4) Time and processes; 5) Resourcefulness, resilience and adaptation (McGregor, 2007: 321). Here is a set of concerns that may be held in common by different disciplines from across the social sciences and which can all be encompassed by a term such as ‘well-being’. However, the resulting approach, like that used to define social quality, is complex. It lacks the parsimony or elegance to be hoped for in an effective or enduring theoretical framework. It turns ‘well-being’ into a convenient but loosely defined portmanteau term. Nonetheless, the first of the five key ideas – the centrality of social human being – explicitly emphasises relational as opposed to individualistic approaches and the sense in which it is through social being that the wholeness of the person is established.
McGregor and Jordan both expressly amplify the claim by the anthropologist Mary Douglas that it is still social, not market, relations that provide the cultural symbols and the meanings that underlie all human exchanges (for example, 1982). It is a claim that may be considered in the context of the thumbnail sketch of human history in Chapter 1. Douglas and Ney point to the way that positivist and behavioural social science are premised paradoxically on the asocial individual person. The whole person – the locus of human transactions and the constructor of myth and meaning – is missing; replaced by a ‘choosing machine’ (1998: 184). Douglas and Ney acknowledge that, potentially, their argument is ‘implicitly reactionary yet radical at the same time’ (1998: 4). They recall Sahlin’s claim that pre-modern hunting gathering societies are not necessarily needy, because their wants are scarce and their means plentiful (see earlier). But Douglas and Ney clearly do not advocate an enforced return to a supposedly carefree Stone Age existence. Certainly, human need is not solely satisfied by access to material goods; it also involves persons as cultural and political creatures, whose prime need is to communicate with others and who, in communication with others, make moral judgements about their needs.
Certain social scientists from within different disciplines have attempted to frame more insightful notions of relationality. For example, as an economist Bruni (2010) reflects on the idea of ‘relational goods’. And as a psycho-therapist Gergen (2015) reflects on interpretive methods for understanding clients’ lived experiences of relational processes. Relationships between human beings are to be valued for the ways they assist, support or help to shape the achievement of individual or personal well-being. But from the perspective of the concept of sociality discussed in Chapter 2 they may also be regarded in a more fundamental sense constitutive of human well-being.
Insights into relational well-being or relationality are similarly offered by emerging psycho-social approaches in social policy (Stenner & Taylor, 2008; D. Taylor, 2011), which contend that relational well-being is a social process, not an individual outcome; it is a socially situated experience, not a subjective state. Certainly, this entails a thick rather than a thin conception of human sociality. As David Taylor succinctly puts it, ‘there is no such thing as individual well-being outside human relationships’ (2018: 9). And though Taylor contends that need and well-being ‘refer to two distinct components of human life’, Marx’s claim that the human essence lies in ‘the ensemble of human relations’ (Donati, 2013: 352) would suggest that human need and relational well-being may be regarded as effectively coterminous.
The ambiguous ‘cultural turn’ affecting the social sciences that began in the 1970s (for example, J. Clarke, 1999) opened the door to the recognition of diversity and difference; to post-structuralist understandings of the production of meaning; and to cultural as much as structural forms of explanation. Elements of this turn assisted our understanding of, but also resonated with, the processes of cultural individualisation alluded to earlier and coincided with the ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1996): that is to say the process by which – to invoke, once again, Habermas’ terminology (1987) – the ‘life world’ has been colonised by ‘the system’; by which social institutions have, increasingly, been taken over by the market and subjected to market principles; by which awareness of the ‘social’ has been displaced by preoccupation with the subjective ‘self’ and with self-management. But some elements of the cultural turn have led on to critical conceptualisations of relationality (C. Powell & Depelteau, 2013), of the essentially relational subject and of the ‘We-relation’ (Donati, 2013): that is to say the generative dynamics of action and interaction to be found in every field of social relations; and the sense that human beings do not necessarily shape, but are shaped by, their relationships with one another and with the associations and institutions that they collectively create.
Sarah White (2017), for example, argues for a concept of relational well-being premised on a relational ontology and an acceptance that relationality is fundamentally constitutive of subjectivity. The autonomous individual of economic liberalism, she argues is a ‘cultural myth’. But
The person as a simple component of the collective is similarly a fantasy. Instead … one of the puzzles that all human societies have to grapple with is the relationship between individual and collective, the self and other(s). … Within all societies there is variability … complexity, inconsistency and contradiction. Within all persons, there is conflict and ambivalence between belonging and autonomy. And collectivities are neither the simple sum of individuals, nor some super-individual in themselves, but develop emergent properties according to the relations that compose them. (p 129)
