Values in the definitions of well-being

Looked at from another perspective, values play an important role in defining well-being at both individual and societal level. Social values determine how one judges a given state of affairs. They also determine what people want for themselves, in individual lives. It is part of everyday experience that when people talk about national problems like population, they differ partly because of differences in access to facts and figures and partly because of differences in values. Did Malthus, Marx, Engels and others not differ on role of population in development of society due to differences about their value systems (Meek, 1971)? Malthus said that the law of diminishing return leads to overpopulation and misery and vice: when population growing at geometric rate overshoots the available means of subsistence and misery follows, there are either drastic changes in people’s sexual behavior leading to decline in the birth rate or there are deaths due to wars and other factors. He said so because he was a Christian parson as well as a professor of political economy. Marx, labeling the charge of plagiarism against Malthus, not only belittled the importance of Malthus’s population theory but also suggested a new way of analyzing social structure and processes. He said that for improvement of human destiny and solving the problem of population surplus, capitalist system must be replaced by a socialist system. This was because he believed in the idea of socialistic revolution and its inevitability. Spiritualists would differ from both Malthus and Marx and analyze social processes more from moral and spiritual standpoints. Issues may be the same but their causes and remedies are seen differently because they are always influenced by the value framework of the analyst.