The Meso-Economics of the Wellbeing Criterion

The theory and application of wellbeing are substantively different from those of welfare of the neoclassical and social choice theory. The concept of wellbeing has the wider implication in constructing models of social contract out of serious consideration of moral and ethical issues in social construction and development. Yet wellbeing is neither an exclusively microeconomic nor a macroeconomic concept. That is because the individual is considered in respect of his potential within the interactive social milieu. The theory of wellbeing in its multidimensional human-centered development perspective is studied in terms of the human capability and its functioning approach (CF) for attaining or failing to attain human development as human potentiality. The CF-theory has been advanced in the light of Amartya Sen’s learned contribution to this field. In this chapter the CF-theory and its comparison and contrast with the social choice and utilitarian theory of the neoclassical type of welfare criterion is critically examined. Other critical approaches to the study of human wellbeing, as in the case of Islamic theorizing, are examined. Arising from such critical studies the different yet all comprehensive formalization and application of the wellbeing concept is propounded in the form of an analytical model premised on epistemic and ontological foundations of unity of knowledge. This approach treats human wellbeing as being interactively integrated with the physicalist and non-physicalist domains comprising the interaction between capabilities and functioning towards sustaining the moral worldview of a unique and universal law. It is the monotheistic law of unity of knowledge called Tawhid that forms the cardinal foundation of Islamic methodological worldview. An empirical explanation of the emergent model of the wellbeing criterion in the methodological framework of Tawhid is provided to establish the ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological properties of the corresponding meaning of the wellbeing criterion in its epistemic sense.