The European Culture for Human Rights: The Right to Happiness

Filomena Maggino · Elena Zamfir

Sep 2014 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This book represents a collection of a selected papers from an international conference focusing on “the right to happiness”, held in Bucharest in December 2012, organized by Dimitie Cantemir Christian Bucharest University, the Romanian Academy’s Research Institute for Quality of Life – Bucharest and the Romanian Institute for Human Rights – Bucharest.

The analysis of happiness from the perspective of the quality of life is a unique development in human rights literature. This analysis is based on people having an active role in bestowing meaning on different components of their life. People have the means and the power to decide whether their life is good or bad by taking into account their subjective perceptions, such as how different domains, such as the family, professional, and civic realms, of their lives interact and what their meanings for their entire lives are.

In truth, modern society, faced with multiple risks of development, has to be controlled by the wisdom or rationality of collective ethics principles in order to grant individual satisfaction. Its means of development through cutting edge technology can contribute to human accomplishments, but also to human downfalls. Thus, in a modern culture, responsible control of technology becomes mandatory. In today’s world, it is impossible to talk about individual satisfaction without collective morals, without the collective responsibility that guides the directions of development of humankind.

This book discusses the issue of quality of life, and sustains a pragmatic vision of the pursuit of happiness and well-being, based on changes aimed at the continual improvement of one’s interior and exterior universe.

About the author

Elena Zamfir is a university professor, and a senior researcher at the Romanian Academy’s Research Institute for Quality of Life, Bucharest. She has been involved in higher education and social research since 1966. Her principal research areas concern sociology and methodology, social-psychology, social work, social policies, antipoverty strategy and social inclusion etc. She is coordinating PhD programme in sociology since 1994–2009 at Bucharest University, 2009 – present at West Timisoara University. Head of Social Work and Applied Social Psychology Department, Bucharest University (1991–2009). Project leader in many national and international social research programs. She is the author of numerous books, papers, and national and international reports.

Filomena Maggino is Professor of Social Statistics at the University of Florence, where she also coordinates the programme “QoLexity. Measuring, Monitoring and Analysis of Quality of Life and its Complexity”. Her main research interests concern data production, data analysis, and data presentation and dissemination, on which she has authored numerous publications. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Social Indicators Research journal and President and co-founder of the Italian Association for Quality-of-Life Studies (AIQUAV). She cooperates with, and is an advisor to, the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) with reference to quality-of-life and wellbeing issues.