Of course, this all begs the question: what do we mean by wellbeing? The
older English term ‘welfare’ can be traced back to at least the fourteenth
century, when it meant to journey well and could indicate both happiness
and prosperity (Williams 1983). In the twentieth century it gradually came to
be associated with the assessment of and provision for needs in the welfare
state, and acquired an increasingly objective, external interpretation. But in
the latter decades of the century new discourses on agency, participation,
and multi-dimensional views of poverty paved the way for a reinvention of
the older notion of wellbeing, which can be traced back to Aristotle and the
Buddha. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the nature of wellbeing is by no means
agreed. The new edition of the usually concise and parsimonious Oxford
Companion to Philosophy (Honderich 2005) has difficulty in defining its
meaning: ‘Variously interpreted as “living and faring well” or “flourishing”, the
notion of wellbeing is intricately bound up with our ideas about what
constitutes human happiness and the sort of life it is good to lead’.