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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 166 (2015) 36 – 42

International Conference on Research Paradigms Transformation in Social Sciences 2014

Well-being: subjective and objective aspects

*
Elena Alatartseva , Galina Barysheva
Tomsk Polytechnic University, 30 Lenin Ave., Tomsk, 634050, Russia

Abstract

The subject of well-being has always excited human society. Various official and scientific research documents have sought to
outline the design and content of well-being, but the specific definition depends on the conceptual approach employed: the
process, system, or other aspect. The purpose of this research is to create an integrated, multi-component model that can ensure
the continued well-being of modern man. The modern man can be defined with regard to two levels of well-being: internal
(subjective) and external (objective). Inner well-being is seen as a human, spiritual well-being associated with one’s personal
characteristics and features. External well-being develops from the perspective of perception and one’s evaluation of human
society.
Each level consists of four key contextual attributes that together constitute well-being:
1) one’s existence in accordance with their natural essence (in harmony with others and the environment);
2) an innate understanding of what is good for oneself, and the presence of the ability and willingness to achieve it;
3) one’s the ability to realize their human potential and plan for life;
4) the creation of a society and empowering people to fulfill the above stated positions 1, 2, 3, and increase activity and awareness.
Such specification of the category “well-being” gives us an opportunity to distinguish between personal well-being of an
individual and social well-being of member of society and state. Only discoursing in the framework of such conceptually
comprehensive logic, it is possible to derive the "formula" of the well-being of human and society.

© 2015
© 2014.The
TheAuthors.
Authors.Published
PublishedbybyElsevier
ElsevierLtd.
Ltd.This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Selection andunder
Peer-review peer-review under of
responsibility responsibility of Tomsk
Tomsk Polytechnic Polytechnic University
University.

Keywords: subjective well-being, objective well-being, Ill-being, sustainable development, human development, human society, socio-economic
aspects, moral-psychological aspects

1. Introduction
The main goal of the state, society, and human is to understand and accept that human well-being is the basis,
foundation, basic premise, and an indispensable condition of a sound society and its successful development and
prosperity. Unhappy people cannot create a society enjoying well-being, and, in its turn, such a society cannot
provide conditions for creating and developing the well-being of people.

*
Elena Alatartseva. Tel.: +7-9138-50-66-51
E-mail address: [email protected]

1877-0428 © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of Tomsk Polytechnic University.
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.12.479
 Thus, well-being is becoming a popular topic for various socio-political, socio-economic, cultural, and historical
theoretical research and applied programmes. However, there is no separate branch of science or area of social,
political, and economic knowledge which would study the well-being of human and society. Perhaps, it is due to the
subjective nature of this concept. There is no unanimously agreed definition of this category or a unanimously agreed
approach to its research and evaluation of its value and importance to the human and the society. In turn, there are
many interpretations of this category, depending on the aspect being considered. The objective of our investigation is
to focus on the social-economic and moral-psychological Aspects of such a complex category as "well-being".

2. Well-being: the objective or socio-economic aspect and subjective or moral-psychological aspect

We consider the category of "human well-being" as an integral, multiaspected, and multifunctional notion, and it
is described only with the help of the combination of four concepts: 1) a human has well-being if they exist in accord
with their nature, their essence; 2) a human has well-being if they understand (are conscious of) what are good things
of life for them and have an opportunity and intention to achieve these good things; 3) a human has well-being if they
have an opportunity to realize their potential as human beings; 4) a human has well-being if the society constituting
the grounds of the state creates conditions and provides opportunities for them to exist in accord with their nature,
realize their potential as human beings, and achieve the good things of life that human strives to achieve. It is our
subjective opinion that the absence of at least one of these concepts does not allow speaking of human well -being and
the quality of their life as a measuring unit of that well-being. It would be possible to speak of material well-being,
wealth, an acceptable or even decent standard of life, but not about well-being. However, defining the category of
"human well-being" as a combination of these four concepts we face a lot of questions and uncertainties. The first
question stems from the first characteristic of the "human well-being" category: what is the nature, the essence of
human? Does the nature of man form the society or, on the contrary, does the society form the nature of man? Does
the human nature change with the development of society or do its bases remain intact? All of these questions can be
answered by philosophers, psychologists, teachers, and sociologists. The second question stems from the third
characteristic of the "human well-being" category: what is a "good thing of life" for man, and is it universal for
everybody? Can the pursuit of such a good thing by one particular person harm other people or a group of people? Is
this good thing variable in space and in time? The third question logically follows from the first and second
characteristics of the "human well-being" category: what is the potential of human as a human being? What can it be
expressed with, and which categories can be used to describe it? Is this potential similar for all groups of people, or is
it different for different people or groups? What is the scale of these differences? Can there appear contradictions in
the process of their realization, and is it possible to eliminate these contradictions? Here it is already the matter of
talents, abilities, inclinations, internal aspirations, psycho-emotional, neurophysiologic, and other features of human
as a biological being, personality, and social creature. And the fourth question, logically derived from the fourth
characteristic of "human well-being" category, is as follows: can society create equal conditions and provide equal
opportunities to all its members to enable them to live in accord with their nature, realize their potential as human
beings, and achieve good things significant to them? Here it is also important to distinguish between personal well -
being of an individual and social well-being of a member of society. This distinction allows differentiating between
well-being as an inner condition of individual and well-being as a criterion of the quality of life and the result of the
development of society and human as a member of society. Only discoursing in the framework of such conceptually
comprehensive logic, it is possible to derive the "formula" of the well-being of human and society, to specify these
concepts, to evaluate them in the retrospective, current and prospective contexts, and to identify the key factors
having an impact on well-being.
Such approach to the conceptualization of the "human well-being" category allows us to distinguish its two
substantial aspects:
1) The objective aspect or objective well-being.
2) The subjective aspect or subjective well-being.
The objective aspect of well-being is characterized by the third and fourth concepts and may be described with
terms defining material well-being and the quality of life: these terms are formed and influenced by such factors as
3 Elena Alatartseva and Galina Barysheva / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 166 (2015) 36 – 42
8
the level and stability of income, the conditions of residence, the opportunity of having education, the quality of the
social and natural environment, safety and security, and the opportunity to realize social and civil rights and needs.
The terms are also measured and evaluated by way of the corresponding values. Meanwhile, the subjective aspect of
well-being is characterized by the first and second concepts and may be conceptualized only as an internal subjective
experience of each particular individual.
Understanding the category of well-being as the combination of its two aspects allows the formation of two
approaches to its specification, measurement, and evaluation. In order for us to have a real opportunity to evaluate
how many people have reached a particular factor of well-being in accord with a particular indicator, how stable this
achievement is, how many people have not reached it and why, what caused the delay, and what has to be done to
eliminate it, it is essential to work out the qualitative and quantitative criteria for all the factors and aspects of
objective well-being which must clearly and objectively express and describe this aspect of well-being. Here, in order
to prevent logical errors, these criteria need to be formed, firstly, through the categories of ill-being and their
qualitative and quantitative criteria and values that have to be really concrete and relevant. For example, such a
parameter as health is evaluated through the number of hospitals and other medical and pharmaceutical institutions
available to people and through the number of people who have asked for medical help. However, if we evaluate this
factor objectively, the increasing number of both medical institutions and people seeking medical help shows ill
health. People become ill, their number is growing, new, not encountered earlier illnesses ap pear, people desperately
need medical help, expenses on medicinal products grow, and the pharmaceutical market grows faster than the
economy on the whole, including national economies. † Also, it appears that, for example, evaluating the level of
well-being through the level of per capita income on a global scale is not just meaningless but also false: it is nothing
‡
but neglecting statistic data and mathematical calculations. The simple, widely known economic truth is that the
level of income on its own does not signify well-being or wealth if the level of expenses is not known. It is important
to know if a person’s income covers his or her expenses rather than how much the person earns. In their turn,
expenses are also stratified according to the levels of needs starting with minimal expenses insufficient to cover
elementary needs – when people have to struggle to survive and they do not always manage to do it, which is
confirmed by the above. These are followed by minimal expenses sufficient to cover elementary needs – where they
extend to physiological survival and a simple self-reproduction of a person, making the person’s further physical,
psychological, moral, ethical, and mental development impossible. Then we move on to minimal expenses
corresponding to the very same elementary needs but remaining below the "elite form" and enabling to afford a little
above that (this level of expenses forms consumer behavior and the so-called middle class, which is the foundation of
the whole economy), and so on. The specific features and the scale of needs are determined by culture, traditions,
internal policy of the society in question, its structure, and many other factors.
The strategy of sustainable human development declared by the UNDP and OECD (2013) is based upon 2
components: 1) sustainable development and 2) human development. Sustainable development itself is based upon
the concept of human development which was presented in the first Human Development Report 1990. This concept
consists of the following key grounds: 1) formation of human abilities and opportunities; 2) use of human abilities
and opportunities; 3) broadening the opportunity of choice for people; 4) balance between the formation of human
abilities and opportunities and their use. These key grounds are the essence of human development. According to the
UNDP, if the balance between these grounds is destroyed, enormous human potential will be lost. "Many people

†
By the year 2016, the volume of the world expenses on medicinal products will reach, according to the prognosis of “IMS Healt h”,
approximately 1,200 billion US dollars (Picture 1), which is conditional upon the development of the world pharmaceutical mar ket and also the
increasing expenses on original and generic medicinal products. In this vein, it is expected that, by the year 2016, the world expenses on original
medicinal products will be approximately 615-645 billion dollars, and on generic products – approximately 400-430 billion dollars. In comparison
with 2012, the growth will be approximately 3-8% for original products and 65-78% for generic products. Here is an article by Ekaterina Dmitrik,
st
published at the web-site of the Russian agency of medical and social information AMI on the 01 July 2013 http://ria-ami.ru/read/17956.
‡
In connection with this, it would be useful to read the book “The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly
Destroyed It”, 2014, by Scott Patterson.
throughout the history lived – and are living now – their lives without being aware of their personal development
potential, or the nature of the organization of their societies and the connections between individuals within said
societies, or the opportunities to implement their personal development potential and thus improving the quality of
life of the society and the humankind in its entirety…, which causes dissatisfaction with life of the vast majority of
these people" (VP SSSR, 2011).
What abilities and opportunities are talked about in the strategy? The most basic ones which, according to A.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs (1999), constitute the first three levels: employment providing the minimal necessary
income allowing for the minimal level of welfare (food, residence, clothes), literacy, safety, basic services including
healthcare, an opportunity to participate in the political life of the country via voting and taking part in political and
public institutes, and elimination of gender inequality.
It is evident then that the policies and strategies of states and regional and international organizations, such as the
Sustainable Development Strategy and Millennium Development Goals of the UNDP and the Better Life Initiative of
the OECD, are focused only at the objective aspect of well-being and, moreover, at its most elementary level.
In its turn, approaches to forming the factors, measuring, and evaluating the subjective aspect of well-being should
be completely different: they should be more complex, more individualized, more directed by different vectors of
influence and impact, based upon deep philosophical, ethical, moral, and psychological principles and categories,
and, thus, they should be less material, less tangible, less quantitative, and more subjective. The subjective aspect of
well-being can be described via such categories as respect and self-respect, confidence, satisfaction, harmony,
harmonious physiological and psycho-emotional state, awareness of the purport of life and the person’s own meaning
and significance in the social and political systems and in the universe, the feeling of love, affection, friendship,
necessity, the person’s own place, implementation of the person’s calling, etc.
At the present moment, the subjective aspect is, by all means, determined by the objective aspect, and, in this
sense, the objective aspect of well-being is, without doubt, primary in relation to the subjective aspect exactly at the
§
present moment, but it is not part of or the basis of the subjective aspect. Conceptually, the subjective aspect is not
limited to its objective counterpart. On the contrary, it is the subjective aspect which forms the principal foundation
for the formation of the objective aspect of well-being, which is especially important for future generations.
Material well-being, health, longevity, literacy, and education are the constituents of the objective aspect of well-
being, and they are, undoubtedly, the factor for creating opportunities and abilities to choose. However, even simply
approaching the rhetoric on well-being, the UNDP and OECD, and the national governments – with or without such
an intention – miss the main fundamental cause which is the moral approach to control in both socio-political and
socio-economic areas even though, for instance, the UNDP Human Development Report 1994 mentions it. The
Report clearly states the attitude towards the obvious contradiction between the vector towards accumulating material
wealth and the vector of human development: "National wealth might expand people's choices. But it might not. The
use that nations make of their wealth, not the wealth itself, is decisive. And unless societies recognize that their real
wealth is their people, an excessive obsession with the creation of material wealth can obscure the ultimate obj ective
of enriching human lives".
It is also admitted that the material welfare that nations reach today does not secure prosperity for future
generations. In this context, it is very important to take into consideration the key principle of sustainable human

§
It is vividly described by the folk wisdom expressed in proverbs and sayings.
All a hungry person can think of is food. Kazakh proverb
When hunger comes in through the door, love escapes through the window. Cuban proverb
Hunger is a bad advisor. African proverb
A hungry person was asked what the heaviest thing was, and he answered: "An empty stomach". Georgian proverb
When a person is hungry, their feet refuse to move. Adygei proverb
Empty stomach makes one’s mind foggy. One cannot sing on an empty stomach. Russian proverbs
4 Elena Alatartseva and Galina Barysheva / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 166 (2015) 36 – 42
0
development, which was expressed in the Report of 1995: in order to provide good quality of life, infinitely high
income is not needed.
However, the manifested principles of sustainable human development which are the guarantee of human well -
being contradict the policies of all national states that declare economic growth to be their primary goal. We suppose
that it is the substitution of true goals which states and societies should pursue and the current methods used to
achieve them that are the true cause of the overall ill-being of people in both objective and subjective aspects.

3. Well-being or ill-being: objective and subjective reasons

Speaking of the objective aspect of well-being, we discover three key reasons for the catastrophic ill-being; they
are as follows:
1) The replacement of development goals of any given economy, expressed in the fact that it is the economic
growth that has been declared the goal of economic development on the global and national levels, not the
satisfaction of the needs of the population;
2) The construction of the global and national levels financial system in isolation from economic goals and tasks,
and the usage of funds credited at a high interest rate as the basic tool of financing, which resulted in the creation of
the global debt economy that led us to the current global mutual debt bondage of all the national economic systems;
3) The intentional creation of aggressive conditions for the functioning of all economic subjects; in other words,
competitive environment.
Speaking of the subjective aspect of well-being, we can see the following three key reasons of ill-being:
1) The elimination of the moral basis of the social, political, and economic interaction, and the construction of
the said interaction on the basis of the objectivist philosophy which has, in the end, formed the economy of market
fundamentalism proclaiming "absolutely unlimited aspiration to personal benefit" as the key driver of the economy
and "the best way to achieve common benefit". It denies "the special nature of common values" and declares that "all
values… can be expressed through market behaviour" (Soros, 2001).
2) The construction of economy on the principles of Keynesian theory of economic relations aimed at boosting
consumers’ demand, which, together with the ideas of market fundamentalism and the modern individualist culture,
have formed a consumer society whose main priority is its individual subjective benefit;
3) The idealisation of democratic society not as one based on solidarity, mutual understanding, mutual respect,
voluntary simplicity for the sake of public welfare and well-being, but as a society of personal rights, liberties, and
needs isolated from those of others, which, in result, has led to the creation of the individualistic society, or the so -
called social atomism, where every person acts to their own personal advantage.
However, there is an earnest conviction that, conceptually, the basis of these fundamental causes is the elimination
of the moral grounds of social interaction on both local and global levels.
As it is known, "the main function of economy is to constantly create such goods that are vital for human life and
without which society would not be able to develop. Economy helps to satisfy a person’s needs in the world of
limited resources" (https://ru.wikipedia.org/). And the pursuit of profits, as it was defined by Aristotle, is not
economy – it is chrematistics. If the purpose of economic activity is to satisfy the needs, then in this case profit and
economic growth are objectively results of this activity and the measuring unit of its efficiency. In this case, the high
level of satisfaction of needs with high profit standards and high economic growth will demonstrate the high level of
the activity itself which is performed in a qualified manner providing for the satisfaction of needs, maintenance of
economic growth, and obtainment of profit. If the purpose of economic activity is to gain profit and maintain
economic growth, the qualitative task – the satisfaction of needs – becomes obscured because profit and economic
growth can be obtained by other means. (Alatartseva, 2014).
In 2009, the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission already reached an unequivocal conclusion that GDP growth does
not signify the quality of life and the well-being of people, society, and state because quite often this growth is
obtained at the expense of worsening the well-being: the intense exploitation of people, the burden of debt and
inflation, the despoilment of resources, irreparable damage to the environment, pollution, and so forth; the growth of
GDP often comes as a result of statistical and mathematical manipulations. As it is known (Perkins, 2014), a
considerable contribution to economic growth is provided by the alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceutics, advertisement,
banking, and finance sectors of the market, which are hardly instrumental for increasing human well-being. "…For
example, if you bombed a city and then rebuilt it all over again, you would be able to demonstrate an enormous
economic leap through "scientific" manipulations of predictive modelling, econometric theory, and statistics".
Moreover, not only the creation of GDP is important, but also its usage. And if the GDP growth is achieved
through a tremendous enriching of a small part of human society, then the said part will use the benefits created for
them, and the other part, the bigger one, will live in poverty.
The debt economy built to provide for economic growth leads to unavoidable impoverishment of everybody who
depends on credit financing on the personal level as well as on the level of the whole society and state. The cause is
simple and evident: if the financing of economic or human development is performed on account of credit resources
which are fee-based, then everything created on account of this financing will in fact belong to the credit source,
which was illustrated by the crisis of 2008.
There is an invincible belief that the fundamental cause of the objective aspect of factors of the critical ill -being of
the modern society is the global decay of morality which is a factor of the subjective aspect of well-being. Weber said
that "Abraham died pleased with the life he had lived, and a nowadays human dies tired of life." Małgorzata Jacyno
(2012), a modern philosopher and sociologist, characterises the modern post-industrial consumer society on the
global scale in her book "The Culture of Individualism" in the following manner: "…the modern culture of
individualism brings chaos and leads to the disintegration of society due to the egotistic ideology of "enjoying life"
and the applied individual life strategies. They hide narcissism and mechanical attitude to others, which, in its turn,
leads to the destruction of society and interconnections… The strategies used by separate people reveal an insistent
pursuit of rationalisation of life in order to "pump out" as much health, happiness, youth, money, and sense of well-
being as possible. Full gyms, popular classes for training intellectual abilities and "being programmed for success",
excessive ambition, inclination to keep to rigorous diets – all of these are another image and the reverse side of the
life of modern individualists keeping to a regime that they would have considered inhuman unless the y had chosen it
for themselves".
The most ancient Vedic doctrine speaks of human well-being as a continuous inner state of wholeness and, due to
harmonious interaction, unity with the surrounding World, Nature, and Cosmos. Then, the dawning and developing
Buddhism regarded the quintessence of human well-being as, expressing it with modern language, a harmonious
psycho-emotional state. Confucius (2001) in his teachings declared human well-being to be the uppermost merit of
life. However, to achieve this merit, a person has to follow unfailingly the five basic rules which, according to
Confucius, are eternal. Firstly, a person should exercise philanthropy and mercy and be humane, which constitutes
the moral and ethical bases of the inviolability of the wholeness of society and state despite any perturbations. The
second rule is implied by the first one and it says that a person should perform all his or her actions, guided by the
principles of truth and fairness, which constitutes the virtue. These two rules create the foundation for the safekeeping
of the integrity of society and its moral and ethical grounds through abiding by the third rule: any activity of any
individual person, group, or government should provide for the preservation of this integrity. Rationality, awareness,
meaningfulness of actions, reasons, and consequences constitute the essence of the forth rule: a person should be
guided by this rule when comprehending the motives of his or her actions, thinking at the scale of societies, states,
and even the World on the whole, predicting the prospects of the consequences, results, and effects of these actions.
And the fifth rule demands that, when performing actions at both personal and global levels, a person must act
sincerely and honestly.**
We can see the same logic of understanding well-being in the works by Aristotle, Socrates, Spinoza, and many
other thinkers. And we consider this aspect extremely important because, in accordance with our earnest conviction,
it is this aspect that constitutes the foundation of the subjective aspect of well-being and forms its objective aspect.

**
These five rules constitute the basis of 14 principles of control in TOYOTA Company and are the foundation of the corporative culture – DAO
TOYOTA.
4 Elena Alatartseva and Galina Barysheva / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 166 (2015) 36 – 42
2
4. Conclusion
It is our earnest conviction that it is possible to provide for the well-being of human and society only by a radical
re-assessment and alteration of moral bases. The President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
also stated that the problem of morality makes the core of all our problems. The fundamental grounds of wellbeing
originate in morality and psychology, and they have to lie in the basis of building social, political, economic, cultural,
and moral interactions if we want to build a society of social progress and reach the goals of sustainable human
development. "Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves."
(Koran, Surah 13:12(11))
Bernard Shaw said "We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned
the simple art of living together as brothers."

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank to Igor Ardashkin, Irina Kashchuk and Fabio Casati for their discussion during the
study and the anonymous referees for their constructive and useful comments on the paper.

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