QUALITY OF LIFE, HEALTH AND HAPPINESS Quality of Life, Health and Happiness

wants, we might end up with quite few entities (for instance, a want to have a long and successful working life, a want to live in one's own country together with one's family) which may not differ so much between individuals. The other alternative of counting all elements in every chain leading up to the fulfilment of the basic wants is, at least in practice, an impossible alternative. For one thing such a chain is infinitely divisible. If one wants to walk to the supermarket, then it may be claimed one wants also to walk to each point on the way to the supermarket. There are infinitely many of these points. It could seem natural here to opt for one's conscious wants. They are clearly not infinitely many. When one wants to walk to the supermarket one does not (normally) consciously want to walk to every point on the way there. The case for just considering conscious wants is, however, not strong, given other considerations that have been set forth in this study. Consider a further difficulty. (ii) On complex and atomic wants. The two wants, to want F and to want G, can always be construed as the single want, to want F and G. Thus any number of contemporaneous wants can always be reduced to one. (Observe that the wants need not refer to the same time. One can have the single want of fulfilling Fat t1 and Gat t2') In order to avoid the mentioned unwanted reductions and expansions certain pragmatic decisions must be made. I shall here just sketch what I mean by this. I think one has to distinguish between certain areas of life, such as work, household activities, family life, political life, religious life, sports activities, other recreational life. In comparing one person's want structure at different times or two persons' want-structures, one would have to go through all these areas and ask whether the person in question has any wants in each of them. The answers must be given on the same level of abstraction, and all goals which are obviously subservient to or parts of goals already mentioned must be dismissed. Example: If P declares that he or she wants to spend 4 hours a week playing golf, P cannot add as a separate want that he or she wants to play golf between 1 and 2 p.m. on Thursdays (if the latter is a part of the former).