REEXAMINATION OF THE CONCEPT OF 'WELL-BEING' AND ITS PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

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In this research we discovered that the 'neotenic' nature of man provides the matrix of human culture. With this discovery in background, we specified some significant conditions of human well-being. Of central importance to our research was the insight that some 'narrative' of a life constitutes a human life in its full sense, so that well-being -perfection of human life qua human life-has to be located in the realm of the 'narrative space'. We studied how reason and emotion work in the formation and development of a human life in this space.In the historical branch of our research, Plato and Aristotle were each found to have a distinctive way of speaking about someone's life. The idea elaborated by Fichte and Hegel in particular that realization of universality is a great task for us was seen to have relevance to the present day. The concepts of 'enjoyment' and 'vulnerability' were found to be a useful tool for furthering ethics of care, a promising trend in ethics.We acquired a lot of knowledge regarding several areas of applied ethics. In the context of medical treatment, we learned that frequently one cannot comprehend a patient's wishes unless one understands how she has narrated or would narrate her life. Besides, a patient's life story is in most cases essentially interwoven with the lives of those surrounding him. We also saw that it is important for attempts at restoring scenes of agricultural villages to conceive of such a scene as having a narrative dimension, owing to the fact that such a scene is closely related to the life stories of the farmers. Finally, we learned that conditions of technology affect the well-being of the whole society profoundly, and that this happens in part via sorts of subtle political effects and implications.