It is relevant for making causal explanations and predictions. — Andrew4Handel

Of what relevance to whether quality of life is something that someone can get wrong.

But you can't realistically say it is not harmful to stab someone. — Andrew4Handel

You can't say that it doesn't have the particular physical effects it does, but those facts imply nothing about any value judgments. So we'd need to cleave using "harm" with a value judgment connotation (which it usually has) from using "harm" to refer to a set of objective physical facts that we're artbitrarily setting off from other physical facts. You're wanting to conflate the two.

Quality of life is their spouse cheating on them. The assessment does not equal the quality of life. Quality of life is someone living in poverty not how they feel about it. — Andrew4Handel

As I said before, psychologists have invented a checklist - a more or less objective (lower-case "o") checklist - and named it with a confusing label that positively telegraphs feelings and subjectivity: "quality of life". Which is it you want to talk about? There is the pointless, meaningless and useless observation of your example, of how the feelings of the subject are objectively mistaken by them, because of facts they don't know. And then there are the actual feelings of that subject, which are as they are, and valid without further justification. [Even if they are objectively mistaken.] Which is it to be, because discussing both at the same time can only lead to confusion, I think. :chin:

You can't say that it doesn't have the particular physical effects it does, but those facts imply nothing about any value judgments. So we'd need to cleave using "harm" with a value judgment connotation (which it usually has) from using "harm" to refer to a set of objective physical facts that we're arbitrarily setting off from other physical facts. You're wanting to conflate the two. — Terrapin Station

If someone is a pain you don't need to invoke a magic value judgement to assess that situation. There is no magic leap between assessing someone is injured, depressed or in poverty to the claim they have a poor quality of life.

The reality of pain and pleasure forces a value onto life anyway.

This is one reason I rejected Christianity because I don't think biblical claims such as the hell doctrine and God's conduct and doctrine in the Old Testament can be put in a positive life. My intuition that a religion or ideology is wrong is when it tries to justify pain.

I think your apparent position that physical harm, does not lead to a value judgement is implausible. The success of pain in biology is to alter behaviour for survival means and indicate negative stimuli.

Nevertheless I am confident in my ability to judge when people have a poor quality of life based on a complex system of assessments and arguments.

If you think it is valid for someone to assert their quality of life based on how they feel, then I can assess their quality of life based on how I "feel" about it. In fact this an assessment that is regularly carried out. Social workers intervene in a family to protect the children or vulnerable people based on their assessment of the situation. Children in particular and adults don't often realize when there is serious harm and dysfunction in the family because it is their norm.

If someone is a pain you don't need to invoke a magic value judgement to assess that situation. There is no magic leap between assessing someone is injured, depressed or in poverty to the claim they have a poor quality of life. — Andrew4Handel

This comment reflects zero understanding of the comment you're responding to.

Your post doesn't make sense.

There is no significant difference between being in pain and a value judgement. Being in pain is the experience that X is undesirable. I don't know what other value judgement you could referring to?

I am certainly confused by your stance.

When we're talking about quality (of life), value, etc., we're talking about someone's personal assessment, how they happen to feel towards something. There's nothing to match or fail to match. There's only something to report--the person's assessment or how they feel. It's not a matter of right or wrong. It just tells us something about that person, something about their dispositions, their preferences, their tastes. — Terrapin Station

This is simply not true.

In other words, we can refer to:
(1) facts that are independent of how someone feels about those facts, and we can refer to
(2) how people feel (about whatever facts).

We can call both (1) and (2) "quality," or "harm" or "pain," or whatever we'd like to call them, but:
(A) we need to be careful that we don't conflate (1) and (2),
(B) for some of those terms, it would be unusual to take (1) as the connotation rather than (2), which is one of the reasons we need to be careful with conflations, and
(C) If we're trying to say that people should care, should make particular decisions about any of this stuff, then we need to say why they should if we're talking about (1) instead of (2)

How people feel can be coherently correlated with facts. You might compare this to the mind body problem and I don't know your stance on that.

If you poke someones brain in a certain area and they have a redness perception that kind of event is used to claim the mind is the brain or in the brain even though the brain activity and redness have different qualities.

So if things like poverty and disease lead people to feel their life is poor quality that is a sound correlation to need a causal account. But it may also be necessary causation that without out the poverty and disease people would not give negative life assessments.

However I also believe there are transcendent or conceptual values. That don't reduce to materialism that I've compared to mathematics and logic.


For example I think almost everyone could imagine a better world and no one believes this is the ideal world. So people can imagine a better quality of life to the one they have. Even if I became really happy tomorrow I could still judge that life was not ideal. This also one argument against God or gods creating life because they claim it is too imperfect.

I feel that people have motivations not to think to clearly or rigorously about quality of life because it has upsetting connotations and so for example some people won't watch the news because it's to depressing.

I wish more people would give input on this subject other than just us two.

This is simply not true. — Andrew4Handel

I think my social worker example illustrates this concerning when they intervene to take a child from his or her parents having made an executive decision that the child will not thrive in that environment and they will not trust the child's assessment alone because children often are not aware how bad their environment is.

This happened to me as a young adult when I started to reassess my childhood and feel traumatized.

It also seem to me that parents justify creating a child based on their claim or feeling that their child will have a good quality of life. But you can't justify having a child based on what the child might feel about life which is pure speculation..