ABSTRACT
So what can ultimately be said about the idea of quality of life? Conceptually, it offers a framework for evaluating human welfare against explicit or implicit points of reference, such as conventional measures of ‘progress’ (economic growth, technological advance, extension of life) and historical or counterfactual positions-how one did live in the past, could live under alternate conditions, shall live in the future. As we have seen, ‘QOL’ can fit over any number of human and environmental domains and be charged with diverse standards and preferences regarding well-being. Yet to be meaningful, defining, evaluating, and pursuing ‘QOL’ within any one domain or concern requires we semantically fix the idea along what I have called four conceptual tensions: between objective and subjective conditions, individual and collective attributions, the production and distribution of well-being, and universalist and relativist understandings. This connotative activity invariably imports certain paradigmatic baggage into the ‘QOL’ evaluation, but that hardly dooms the idea to incoherence. Just the opposite-such latent signification is an important basis for the idea’s utility, as ‘QOL’ fits into the going concerns and background assumptions for any particular evaluative undertaking.
