The Ladder of Wellness: Relating Happiness, Subjective Well-Being, and Flourishing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the various rungs on what I refer to as the “ladder of wellness”. Using an 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 disabled people 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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".