On Citizen Well-Being

Abstract

This dissertation is focused on developing the notion of citizen well-being: what it means to live a life that is good for the person living it as a member of a political community. This notion is one that, I will argue, is present in the history of moral and political theory, but that is not explicitly identified as such. Instead, it is often implicit in claims made about the happiness of people living in just societies, for example, or in claims about the damage done by injustice or oppression. First, in the introduction I aim to clarify how the notion of citizen well-being should be situated in the contemporary well-being literature. Second, I aim to explore one particular theory of citizen well-being – a hybrid theory – in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where I argue the notion implicitly appears. The latter is the focus of the three chapters. Chapter 1 will identify both the notion of citizen well-being and this hybrid theory in Rousseau; Chapter 2 will fill in the account with an accompanying account of the civic virtues; finally, Chapter 3 will show how the theory might be applied to help us better understand other elements of Rousseau’s political theory. I will conclude with an exploration, related to the work in Chapter 3, of how this theory might be applied in future research.