ABSTRACT

The question of well-being is fundamentally bound up with the question of who we are. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle approaches the question of the good life, eudaimonia, via an account of the human function. 1 From a feminist perspective, we can approach the question of well-being in a similar way: we can ask what it will be to live well for woman, by examining what is distinctive about being a woman. 2 The insight we get, however, is rather different from Aristotle’s. Whereas he identified the human function with rationality, and thus living well with reasoning well; 3 when we turn to ask what is distinctive about women’s existence, we find that one of the most common answers is ‘oppression’. 4 Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex argues that the general situation of woman is one of oppression, an idea which crystallises in the notion of woman as ‘Other’. 5 Woman is not an autonomous being, but is seen as passive and objectified. 6 More recently, Sally Haslanger has argued that, in general, women can be defined as agents who are, in some way, socially subordinated on the basis of presumed female sex. 7 From a feminist perspective, we are therefore furnished with a different starting point from which to theorise well-being, a starting point that not only alters how we approach this notion, but that also alters how we come to understand it.