Human Needs

31 Pages 7634 Words

neglected, resulting in an inherently narrow concept of the whole. From evaluating Marglin’s perspec!
tive, one can see that she believes that any list that is put together is going to be culturally biased no matter what. It is a complicated task to try to accomplish. The quality of life in a individuals is defined in terms of social indicators (IE: nutrition, crime rates, frequency of disease, air quality, health care, divorce rates, education, etc). The difficulty in evaluating the quality of life lies within the realm of knowing how to appraise each factor concerned. For example, to utilize a simplistic illustration, is clean drinking water more or less important than good education in our schools? One way of achieving a cohesive index would be to define the quality of life as a subjective measure of a perceived satisfaction or dissatisfaction within a life. Nevertheless, is it possible to conceive of circumstances in which the perceived satisfaction could vary quite independently of what we regard as the quality of life? I definitely believe this is an avoidable factor. Well being is said to be both a condition of the good life as well as what the good life achieves. It can be defined as a “flourishing”, it is bound with the very ideas that constitute human happiness. The phrase “good life” itself is ambiguous. It can be looked at in terms of a morally good life versus the life most aspire to achieve. It is important to note that this idea includes solace and satisfaction. This ambiguity can be taken as an indication of how unclear we ultimately find the connection between being morally good and possessing health, wealth, happiness and other components of well being. Before we delve into this naively let us first document in some detail Martha Nussbaum’s re-evaluation of Sen’s opus, so that we can better understand the material with which we have to work.

 Mortality
All human beings have an aversion t...