https://internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/index.php/ijow <p>The <em>International Journal of Wellbeing</em> was launched on 31st January 2011 in order to promote interdisciplinary research on wellbeing. The editorial team is dedicated to open access for academic research. The content is free for everyone to access, and there are no submission or publication fees for authors.</p> International Journal of Wellbeing Charitable Trust en-US International Journal of Wellbeing 1179-8602 <p>Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:</p> <ol type="a"> <li>Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a <a title="CC License Information" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License</a> that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The license prevents others from using the work for profit without the express consent of the author(s). The license also prevents the creation of derivative works without the express consent of the author(s). Note that derivative works are very similar in nature to the original. Merely quoting (and appropriately referencing) a passage of a work is not making a derivative of it.</li> <li>Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li> <li>Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See <a href="http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html" target="_new">The Effect of Open Access</a>).</li> </ol> https://internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/index.php/ijow/article/view/6457 <p>This article examines three recurring arguments for evaluative subjective well-being (swb) measures: instruments that ask respondents to broadly assess their lives, such as the Cantril Ladder and general life satisfaction questions. To organise the debate and support better dialogue between critics and supporters of these instruments, we draw on two conceptual tools from the philosophy of well-being: the distinction between constitutive and determinative questions, and the characterisation of well-being as a thick concept. The first argument we analyse holds that leaving the object undefined is desirable (a "non-paternalistic" approach). We argue that this stance legitimately declines the constitutive question about well-being, but that in delegating it to respondents it makes engagement with that question a precondition for interpreting the resulting scores. The second argument holds that the absence of a clear definition is not disqualifying, given large samples, respondents' familiarity with the relevant expressions, and the instruments' psychometric properties. We argue that each support admits an alternative explanation grounded in the social rules governing well-being talk, and that no thin, purely descriptive construct lies beneath the everyday expressions these measures rely on. The third argument holds that the measures are useful regardless of these limitations. Here we distinguish an agnostic stance, for which scores are a means of predicting other outcomes, from a score-as-target stance, for which raising the scores is itself the end. The agnostic stance declines constitutive questions successfully, at the price of abandoning well-being as the central object of research; the score-as-target stance cannot, since it must still say why this quantity rather than another deserves to be raised. From these analyses, we propose two practices to bridge critical and applied approaches: making constitutive commitments explicit, and exercising greater rigour in the use of words and expressions.</p> Luciano Sewaybricker Copyright (c) 2026 Luciano Sewaybricker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 2026-11-12 2026-11-12 16 4 10.5502/ijw.v16i4.6457