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"Well-being" trend
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Popular use of the term ‘well-being’ usually relates to health. A doctor's surgery may run a ‘Women's Well-being Clinic’, for example. Philosophical use is broader, but related, and amounts to the notion of how well a person's life is going for that person. A person's well-being is what is ‘good for’ them. Health, then, might be said to be a constituent of my well-being, but it is not plausibly taken to be all that matters for my well-being. One correlate term worth noting here is ‘self-interest’: my self-interest is what is in the interest of myself, and not others.
The philosophical use of the term also tends to encompass the ‘negative’ aspects of how a person's life goes for them. So we may speak of the well-being of someone who is, and will remain in, the most terrible agony: their well-being is negative, and such that their life is worse for them than no life at all. The same is true of closely allied terms, such as ‘welfare’, which covers how a person is faring as a whole, whether well or badly, or ‘happiness’, which can be understood ? as it was by the classical utilitarians from Jeremy Bentham onwards, for example ? to be the balance between good and bad things in a person's life. But note that philosophers also use such terms in the more standard ‘positive’ way, speaking of ‘ill-being’, ‘ill-faring’, or, of course, ‘unhappiness’ to capture the negative aspects of individuals' lives.
‘Happiness’ is often used, in ordinary life, to refer to a short-lived state of a person, frequently a feeling of contentment: ‘You look happy today’; ‘I'm very happy for you’. Philosophically, its scope is more often wider, encompassing a whole life. And in philosophy it is possible to speak of the happiness of a person's life, or of their happy life, even if that person was in fact usually pretty miserable. The point is that some good things in their life made it a happy one, even though they lacked contentment.
When discussing the notion of what makes life good for the individual living that life, it is preferable to use the term ‘well-being’ instead of ‘happiness’. For we want at least to allow conceptual space for the possibility that, for example, the life of a plant may be ‘good for’ that plant. And speaking of the happiness of a plant would be stretching language too far. (An alternative here might be ‘flourishing’, though this might be taken to bias the analysis of human well-being in the direction of some kind of natural teleology.) In that respect, the Greek word commonly translated ‘happiness’ (eudaimonia) might be thought to be superior. But, in fact, eudaimonia seems not only to have been restricted to conscious beings, but to human beings: animals cannot be eudaimon. This is because eudaimonia suggests that the gods, or fortune, have favoured one, and the idea that the gods could care about non-humans would not have occurred to most Greeks.
It is occasionally claimed that certain ancient ethical theories, such as Aristotle's, result in the collapse of the very notion of well-being. On Aristotle's view, if you are my friend, then my well-being is closely bound up with yours. It might be tempting, then, to say that ‘your’ well-being is ‘part’ of mine, in which case the distinction between what is good for me and what is good for others has broken down. But this temptation should be resisted. Your well-being concerns how well your life goes for you, and we can allow that my well-being depends on yours without introducing the confusing notion that my well-being is constituted by yours. There are signs in Aristotelian thought of an expansion of the subject or owner of well-being. A friend is ‘another self’, so that what benefits my friend benefits me. But this should be taken either as a metaphorical expression of the dependence claim, or as an identity claim which does not threaten the notion of well-being: if you really are the same person as I am, then of course what is good for you will be what is good for me, since there is no longer any metaphysically significant distinction between you and me.
Well-being is a kind of value, sometimes called ‘prudential value’, to be distinguished from, for example, aesthetic value or moral value. What marks it out is the notion of ‘good for’. The serenity of a Vermeer painting, for example, is a kind of goodness, but it is not ‘good for’ the painting. It may be good for us to contemplate such serenity, but contemplating serenity is not the same as the serenity itself. Likewise, my giving money to a development charity may have moral value, that is, be morally good. And the effects of my donation may be good for others. But it remains an open question whether my being morally good is good for me; and, if it is, its being good for me is still conceptually distinct from its being morally good.
Question
1. Have you ever heard "well-being" trend?
2. What is "well-being" you think? How do you practice "well-being"?
3. What effect is "well-being" trend?( Both good point and bad point )
4. Do you have any good way about 'Being healthy'? (Generally...)
이 글은「대학연합영어토론동아리」www.pioneerclub.com에서 제공하는 영어토론 정보입니다.
The philosophical use of the term also tends to encompass the ‘negative’ aspects of how a person's life goes for them. So we may speak of the well-being of someone who is, and will remain in, the most terrible agony: their well-being is negative, and such that their life is worse for them than no life at all. The same is true of closely allied terms, such as ‘welfare’, which covers how a person is faring as a whole, whether well or badly, or ‘happiness’, which can be understood ? as it was by the classical utilitarians from Jeremy Bentham onwards, for example ? to be the balance between good and bad things in a person's life. But note that philosophers also use such terms in the more standard ‘positive’ way, speaking of ‘ill-being’, ‘ill-faring’, or, of course, ‘unhappiness’ to capture the negative aspects of individuals' lives.
‘Happiness’ is often used, in ordinary life, to refer to a short-lived state of a person, frequently a feeling of contentment: ‘You look happy today’; ‘I'm very happy for you’. Philosophically, its scope is more often wider, encompassing a whole life. And in philosophy it is possible to speak of the happiness of a person's life, or of their happy life, even if that person was in fact usually pretty miserable. The point is that some good things in their life made it a happy one, even though they lacked contentment.
When discussing the notion of what makes life good for the individual living that life, it is preferable to use the term ‘well-being’ instead of ‘happiness’. For we want at least to allow conceptual space for the possibility that, for example, the life of a plant may be ‘good for’ that plant. And speaking of the happiness of a plant would be stretching language too far. (An alternative here might be ‘flourishing’, though this might be taken to bias the analysis of human well-being in the direction of some kind of natural teleology.) In that respect, the Greek word commonly translated ‘happiness’ (eudaimonia) might be thought to be superior. But, in fact, eudaimonia seems not only to have been restricted to conscious beings, but to human beings: animals cannot be eudaimon. This is because eudaimonia suggests that the gods, or fortune, have favoured one, and the idea that the gods could care about non-humans would not have occurred to most Greeks.
It is occasionally claimed that certain ancient ethical theories, such as Aristotle's, result in the collapse of the very notion of well-being. On Aristotle's view, if you are my friend, then my well-being is closely bound up with yours. It might be tempting, then, to say that ‘your’ well-being is ‘part’ of mine, in which case the distinction between what is good for me and what is good for others has broken down. But this temptation should be resisted. Your well-being concerns how well your life goes for you, and we can allow that my well-being depends on yours without introducing the confusing notion that my well-being is constituted by yours. There are signs in Aristotelian thought of an expansion of the subject or owner of well-being. A friend is ‘another self’, so that what benefits my friend benefits me. But this should be taken either as a metaphorical expression of the dependence claim, or as an identity claim which does not threaten the notion of well-being: if you really are the same person as I am, then of course what is good for you will be what is good for me, since there is no longer any metaphysically significant distinction between you and me.
Well-being is a kind of value, sometimes called ‘prudential value’, to be distinguished from, for example, aesthetic value or moral value. What marks it out is the notion of ‘good for’. The serenity of a Vermeer painting, for example, is a kind of goodness, but it is not ‘good for’ the painting. It may be good for us to contemplate such serenity, but contemplating serenity is not the same as the serenity itself. Likewise, my giving money to a development charity may have moral value, that is, be morally good. And the effects of my donation may be good for others. But it remains an open question whether my being morally good is good for me; and, if it is, its being good for me is still conceptually distinct from its being morally good.
Question
1. Have you ever heard "well-being" trend?
2. What is "well-being" you think? How do you practice "well-being"?
3. What effect is "well-being" trend?( Both good point and bad point )
4. Do you have any good way about 'Being healthy'? (Generally...)
이 글은「대학연합영어토론동아리」www.pioneerclub.com에서 제공하는 영어토론 정보입니다.
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