Questions regarding the essential qualities of a good society and
the good life have captured the minds of the greatest thinkers across
time and cultures. For example, in Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia,
individuals were called on to realize their full potentialities in order to
achieve a “good life.” In contrast, Eastern philosophers stressed the
virtue of restraining individual desires, and prescribed an ideology
that encouraged the equal distribution of resources among people.
In the categorical imperative, Emanual Kant called for individuals
to achieve a good society by acting in a moral way such that their
actions could be the basis of universal laws. A challenging agenda
laid down by recent trends in the social and behavioral sciences is
to design scientific ways of measuring human well-being.
There are three major philosophical approaches to determining
the quality of life (Brock, 1993). The first approach describes characteristics
of the good life that are dictated by normative ideals based
on a religious, philosophical, or other systems. For example, we
might believe that the good life must include helping others because
this is dictated by our religious principles. Another example of this
approach is that Kant believed that judgments about the correctness of behavior, and therefore the good life, come from rational thought.
These approaches to quality of life depend neither on the subjective
experience of people nor on the fulfillment of their wishes. As we
will see, this approach to quality of life is most clearly related to the
social indicators tradition in the social sciences.