The Ladder of Wellness: Relating Happiness, Subjective Well-Being, and Flourishing

This paper investigates the various rungs on what I refer to as the “ladder of wellness”. Using a eudaimonist foundation – while setting out key differences with Aristotle’s happiness – the concepts of happiness, subjective well-being (SWB), and flourishing are defined and contextualized. The highest and most desirable state on the wellness ladder is flourishing, followed by SWB, and finally happiness. Drawing on ethical philosophy, positive psychology, and sociology, I describe how there are basic objective requirements for achieving the above terms, conditions which are borrowed from Nussbaum’s “ten central human capabilities” and expanded upon to become time-, space-, and agent-neutral. While these requirements are objective, they can be met through subjective means that vary from person to person. The paper concludes by contextualizing wellness in relation to Butler’s concept of abject or illegitimate bodies. I explain how marginalized groups such as women, racialized people, sexual minorities, and people with disabilities all share in being illegitimated by subjects (i.e. more powerful social groups). I close by describing why these marginalized bodies are much less likely to achieve the states on the ladder of wellness, and I use the example of ascribed status within a caste system to illustrate how the concept of luck relates to abjection and thus wellness.