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Abstract
For more than 40 years, the Kingdom of Bhutan has eschewed evaluating its socio-economic status in terms of Gross Domestic Product and has instead done so under the heading of ‘Gross National Happiness’ (GNH). As part of the upswing in international interest in well-being as the proper final end of development, it would be apt to critically explore the approach that has been in use for several decades. In this article, I expound the central elements of GNH and discuss their strengths and weaknesses from a moral-philosophical perspective. I conclude that while GNH covers some blind spots missed by influential Western indices with which readers are likely to be more familiar, the latter, along with Martha Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach, also have corrections to offer the former, inviting a fascinating cross-cultural exchange about how to understand the nature of well-being for purposes of public policy.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on a prior draft of this article, I thank Christopher Wareham and two anonymous referees for this journal, one of whom offered particularly thoughtful input. In addition, I am grateful to Dasho Karma Ura and Professor Sabine Alkire for having invited me onto the International Expert Working Group on Happiness and Well-Being, which was the impetus for me to reflect critically on Bhutan's GNH Index.
Notes
1. See, for example, GNH Commission (Citation2008, 16–17).
2. It would be interesting to determine whether the nine domains can be reduced to a single property, other than the abstract category of happiness, quality of life or well-being. Although those advocating GNH recurrently note that its conception of happiness is multi-dimensional and not monistic, it is worth considering whether the key domains are ultimately different instances of a single objective feature. Two promising candidates, meriting in-depth exploration elsewhere, are states of virtue and communal relationships. Some have maintained, implausibly in my view, that GNH's conception of happiness is ultimately a subjective matter of ‘how much the person likes the life he/she leads’ (Veenhoven Citation2004, 295).
3. Though a bit more weight is given to indicators that do not rely so heavily on self-reporting and instead admit of independent and accurate measurements of real properties, on which see Ura et al. (Citation2012a, 41).
4. The final, cumulative index itself is somewhat more complicated than this, being a combined measurement of ‘headcount’ and ‘intensity’, roughly, how many people have achieved sufficiency in at least six of the nine domains and how many domains in which the not-yet-happy have achieved sufficiency (Ura et al. Citation2012a, 46–9).
5. For these and additional results, see The Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research (Citation2013); Ura et al. (Citation2012a, 51–64, Citation2012b, 39–53).
6. As opposed to the nature of the goods themselves or ‘focal features’ of justice (Sen Citation1990), which for Rawls and many other liberals should not be happiness or some other condition considered good for its own sake; for Rawls, only instrumental values, and specifically means that are generally useful for achieving ends (‘social primary goods’), are what the state should regulate (Citation1999, 78–86).
7. For more on Buddhism and the way it has informed GNH, see Lokamitra (Citation2004); Tashi (Citation2004).
8. Here, too, one should recall GNH's inclusion of moral values in the education domain.
9. See also Basu (Citation2005) for criticism of the HDI from a Hindu spiritual perspective.
10. I will just note that an interesting argumentative strategy suggested by, but underexplored in, the literature for questioning the standard conception of liberalism is to consider broadening the usual notion of what counts as a ‘primary good’ to include the use of a state (Metz Citation2001), relationships (Brake Citation2010) and subjective well-being (Wren-Lewis Citation2013).
11. This is not explicit in key HDI documents, but the UNDP (Citation2010, 183) indicates that its community dimension relies strictly on Gallup polls, which cash out community as above (Gallup Citation2013).
12. There is little literature highlighting this facet of GNH, but see Priesner (Citation1999, 37–38). I first became aware of it in January 2013 as a result of personal conversation with Dasho Karma Ura, the intellectual figurehead of GNH in Bhutan.
13. For uses of this phrase by some influential thinkers, see Steiner (Citation1923) and Schlick (Citation1927, 69–70). For thorough discussion of the triad in the context of what makes a life meaningful, see Metz (Citation2011, Citation2013).
14. That is not yet to say that GNH is more comprehensive than philosophical theories of the good life or even of the goods that a state ought to make available, as in e.g. Nussbaum (Citation2011), discussed below.
15. Noticed, with laughter, by myself and others at a January 2013 meeting of the International Expert Working Group on Happiness and Well-Being, which The Centre for Bhutan Studies formed in late 2012 and early 2013 to help explicate GNH for an international audience of governments and policy-makers (resulting in Boniwell Citation2013). Note, by the way, that Nussbaum does include sexual satisfaction among her conception of key human capabilities for a state to advance (Citation2011, 33).
16. Some of the rest of this paragraph borrows from Metz (Citation2014).