Kevin Moore - Wellbeing and Aspirational Culture

Kevin Moore

Wellbeing and Aspirational Culture

To my father, James Noel Moore who taught me the importance of simply being an ordinary person.

To Ludwig Wittgenstein who, through his philosophy has made me understand why the ordinary, everyday world we live in is so extraordinary.

This book is about the difficulties involved in trying to experience wellbeing in todays world. I take as straightforward facts that people are having difficulty living well and that they are having these difficulties irrespective of claims by some that, on all sorts of dimensions, the human world is better than it has ever been. To put it at its starkest, there may well have been a reduction in all forms of physical violence (Pinker ) involves seeing that our wellbeing concerns are principally about personsand being clear about just what a person is should therefore be central to understanding wellbeing. It is persons who are the enduring, identifiable subjects of experience and so they must also be the subjects of any experience of wellbeing . Yet, crucially, personsperhaps unlike individual biological members of the human speciesare intimately associated with the social and the cultural worlds that generate them. They are perhaps best expressed as doings in that worldrather than beings or entities (though I will refer to them as entities and beings for simplicitys sake). This connection to the sociocultural world is probably why psychology in general, and the psychology of wellbeing in particular, has had a deal of difficulty incorporating, or even acknowledging, persons in theory. Psychology is all about the person, but the person is nowhere to be seen in psychological theory (with some notable exceptions, as we will see).

Given these points, the way we are typically concerned with wellbeing cannot be understood without also understanding the kinds of cultures within which persons arise. And, to add some complexity, wellbeing also cannot be understood fully without some understanding of the typical lifetasks (Cantor et al. ) a particular culture sets before the persons that it generates. The extent to which these tasks are mastered will determine the extent to which that person is found to be in good standing as a person in that culture. For a person, being in such good standing is a large part of living a good life ; a life of wellbeing . But a person is not passive in these assessments of her standing. The skills we each develop and can draw upon to present ourselvesto both ourselves and othersas being in such good standing are crucial tools we bring both to achieving our life tasks and to our presentation of our success, or lack of success, at them.

The argument of this book is straightforward and has two parts. The first part is the claim that work on wellbeing especially within psychology has omitted from consideration a fundamentally important question: The wellbeing of what? As already mentioned, I argue that the answer to that question is persons. Much of the theoretical and conceptual importance of what follows therefore concerns understanding what persons are and why such curious entities came to be. That is, I make an argument for the basic functional features of persons and personhood and, hence, why and how persons evolved and also why they are one of the main targets of human development.