Objective Quality of Life
I think you can validly challenge someone about the quality of life and their quality of life on an empirical basis.
The alternative where someone is always right about the quality of life means you cannot differentiate between quality of life and is a subjective nihilism, where the individual is always right about their interpretation of the external world.
The ad absurdum is that a child dying of malnutrition in a war torn slum could claim to have a good quality of life. But if you accept this would be an absurd claim then there is some objective standard. Also examples are such as the Holocaust, famine in general, mental illness and cancer.
So once you accept somethings are highly undesirable you can start an empirical utilitarian calculation about the quality of life.
But there are a lot of more subtle factors creating a poor quality of life. I think David Benatar makes a similar point here. It is all the little irritant and struggles and disappointments of every day.
The alternative where someone is always right about the quality of life means you cannot differentiate between quality of life and is a subjective nihilism, where the individual is always right about their interpretation of the external world.
The ad absurdum is that a child dying of malnutrition in a war torn slum could claim to have a good quality of life. But if you accept this would be an absurd claim then there is some objective standard. Also examples are such as the Holocaust, famine in general, mental illness and cancer.
So once you accept somethings are highly undesirable you can start an empirical utilitarian calculation about the quality of life.
But there are a lot of more subtle factors creating a poor quality of life. I think David Benatar makes a similar point here. It is all the little irritant and struggles and disappointments of every day.
Comments (71)
You mean the question of the quality of someone's life can be settled by empirical facts about them?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
How about an alternative where we cannot quantify the quality of everyone's life?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Aren't you arguing form particular to the general here? What is your justification for the case that we can make an empirical judgement about all the quality of life issues, and not just the cases where people are in deep suffering?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
What about the quality of lives that people are happy? Without mention to happiness, your thesis leads, at best, to a negative utilitarian calculation.
It's not that they're right. They're not wrong, either. Right and wrong about such things is a category error.
That's because what it is to get something right or wrong is to either accurately match, in belief (and subsequently claim, etc.), how something actually happens to be, or to alternately fail to match how something actually happens to be. For example, if you believe that the surface of the moon is mostly oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, then you're right--you're matching what the moon happens to be composed of, but if you believe that the surface of the moon is made of cheese, you're wrong.
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.
I think there is something to match and fail to match which is their beliefs about how the world is. Facts about a disease they have, or level of injury, facts about societal inequality. Sometimes people feelings are based on inaccurate beliefs.
What I think is nihilism is the idea that someone who feels that something like child abuse is acceptable cannot be challenged by external facts. If someone feels something is acceptable that is more likely to contribute to how they act in the external world.
If you can't pin values down to objective facts that doesn't help any position.
Sure, no argument there, but those things just aren't the same thing as their assessment of their quality of life.
Yes, that can be true, too, but again, it doesn't amount to being able to get their quality of life assessment wrong. It's also not the case that someone will necessarily change their quality of life assessment just because they were wrong about, for example, whether they had some disease. They might change their quality of life assessment based on that, but they won't necessarily.
It's rather that it can't be changed by external facts re whether child abuse is acceptable, because there are no external facts about such things. But sure, people factor external facts into their judgments about such things, and different knowledge can change their judgments--but it won't necessarily change their judgments, since no value judgments are implied by any particular facts, and even if their judgments do change, they won't necessarily change in predictable ways.
I am pointing out the absurdity of claiming people in famine and genocide etc cannot be judged to have a poor quality of life
The equation then is how much of this suffering is in our world?. We live in the world and co exist with this suffering.
I think reflection on historical evils and current suffering in the world could easily be seen as something that could affect ones quality of life by reflecting on it and reflecting on falling victim to something like it.
I think this is the problem with claims of happiness because happiness seems absurd in certain contexts.
I find it hard to see things that warrant happiness because of the backdrop of problems.
I am not convinced quality of life is based on how someone feels. People can be happy whilst suffering. They don't believe they have a great quality of life but they have found some things to be happy about. So I don't think feeling happy means you have a good quality of life or that you believe that you have a good quality of life.
But someone can have a privileged lifestyle but be unhappy for some reason. I don't know what to make of that. There is not many circumstances it seems that can guarantee a fixed emotional response. I think it is easier to generate suffering than happiness but I don't know what the depression statistics are for people in the wealthier brackets. it raises the question of how we can increase happiness.
It is hard to find a framework to judge quality of life and value of life so I think facts about inequality, poverty, disease, mental illness etc are the best metric. Things that generate happiness can be in an equation I just find those things harder to find.
I think it is harder to pin down the causes of happiness compared to pain. For example stamping on someones foot will most likely hart them but I don't think any actions can guarantee happiness and I am not sure that there is somewhere in the nervous system equivalent to the pain system for pleasure.
Pain can be caused by chemical and neuronal activity caused by injury. It is often guaranteed to occur if the nervous system is working.
Nevertheless pain and pleasure could mislead us if they were somehow generated wrongly. Maybe winning the lottery is a situation where some happiness should be guaranteed? Knowing you may never have to work again and may not have to worry about funding your old age.
???
Quality of life = how you feel about your quality of life. In other words, it's your assessment of your quality of life. I'm not saying it's how you feel about something else.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
We could simply ask people and then report the results.
Here is one of the first definitions of "Quality" that I found: "the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind" So this to me implies an objective standard something being a measured against as opposed an opinion.
Quoting Terrapin Station
What kind of questions would you ask them? I think you would have to ask a lot of sophisticated and nuanced questions to get a genuine well thought out answer.
The examples I was referring to is where someone acknowledges that they have a poor quality of lifelike a profound disability or are comparatively poor but is not unhappy. You can make this kind of distinction in judgments between your emotional state and facts abut how your life is
What would you say is the process for establishing an objective standard?
In that definition it says to be measured against other things of a similar kind.
So it would probably involve comparing states of being. So If you live in poverty you know there is a better state of being you are not in and compare badly to.
I don't know if you believe that we can talk about levels of happiness in a society. Do you think that if 70% of people report being happy that we can refer to society as mainly happy as an objective fact?
I think that you can't add emotional states together like that really because it is based on subjective claims but i think we can compare states of being like levels of inequality and disease.
on the other hand you could be what i consider nihilist and say that all that matters is what someone claims and there can be only objective scientific facts about the constituents of matter interacting (and not psychology).
Okay, but wait. It seems like we're brushing over this too quickly.
If we're talking about there being a standard as measured against other things of a similar kind, we can't just talk about measuring against things of a similar kind while bypassing the whole notion of there being a standard of that. The standard is the focus of the definition, and "as measured against other things of a similar kind" is telling us some more detail about the standard.
Re your example, "I live in poverty compared to x," doesn't tell us anything at all about the assessment someone makes with respect to their quality of life. Maybe they think this factor is irrelevant. Maybe they even think it's better to live in poverty. They could have any assessment. And it especially doesn't tell us anything about what's a right or wrong assessment.
I think you can refer to biological facts. Facts about how the body functions and what a likely outcome is going to be such as whether an event will cause pain or illness. Relatively poverty is more likely to cause early death, depression and mean you live in an area with a higher crime rate.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This where it seems absurd. Very few people want to live in poverty but some religious people might take a vow of poverty. I think the likelihood of people enjoying a situation is fairly objective. It seems the most diversity of tastes comes in less important areas like what music you enjoy as opposed to physical well being.
There was the case of Bhutan that was considered one of the happiest countries. They introduced television in 1999 and experienced a sudden crime wave. It was suggested that this was because people could see things on televisions that they didn't have an now aspired to.
They suggest this is why there is substantial unhappiness in the western world.
So it seems you can discover that you do not have a good quality of life compared to X. But I am by no means saying that you have to be wealthy to be happy. I just think there are objective reasons for being unhappy or unwell or feeling a sense of injustice.
For example if someone wanted to get married and have children but never did. Or if someone wanted to see an end to cancer and poverty. Or if someone wanted to be a musician but failed to be. And so on.
I think that, too, given what likelihood is--that is, given how statistics work, etc.
The problem is this: what does that fact have to do with whether someone can get their quality of life wrong?
If statistics and other external facts go against someone having a good quality of life yet they believe they have then that raises questions about their judgement.
Something subjective can still be wrong. For example illusions such as where one line seems longer than another or when a bush looks like a cow in the night.
So I think false beliefs can make people judgement wrong.
For example lots of people have been shown to exhibit thejust world fallacy or just world hypothesis where they show that they believe the world is more just or fair than it actually is and the fundamental attribution error where they misattribute causality and peoples degree of responsibility in a scenario.
You'd have to believe that people should feel the same way, should make the same assessments, as most other people. But what would be the argument for that?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Right, if we're talking about something where you can either match or fail to match what's the case with x in the external world. But what would anyone be matching or failing to match re quality of life assessments? You're thinking that they're failing to match how most people feel and that they're trying to match how most people feel?
As I mentioned with the just world fallacy they have false beliefs about the external world so they the emotions they feel are being generated by falsehoods. For example someone might feel happy because they believe poverty has decreased then you can hypothetically show them statistics that refute this belief showing that their feelings had a false basis.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Like I said you can judge that someone has a poor quality of life based on their own standards. So before I suggested someone was making a wrong assessment about the quality of their life I would have to examine their beliefs methodologically.
Like I also mentioned people can acknowledge they have a below average quality of life whilst being happy. I could be happy but wish my eyesight was better and that I earned a higher wage.
So after you have ruled out all these possibilities then you can see whether they still believe they have a good quality of life. I think if someone had lots of problems but still considered they had a good quality of life that would suggest they were just lucky with their brain chemistry and biochemistry and that the quality of life claim could not come from their actual circumstances.
I don't think one person claims about their quality of life is relevant in the wider picture of society per se when you are making a calculation about the average desirability of life. I don't think if some people are happy in poverty that mitigates poverty.
But they dont have false beliefs about their quality of life assessment. You're trying to claim that the quality of life assessment can be objective. Quality of life assessment isn't the same thing as facts that might have an impact on quality of life assessments.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yeah, it's not going to matter when you want to talk about averages, but talking about averages also doesn't tell you what anyone's assessment is going to be, I don't believe that it tells you what anyone's assessment is likely to be, and it certainly can't tell you that anyone's assessment is wrong.
I think there are two aspects to a quality of life assessment. How someone feels about their life and the physical facts.
If you are a building a society you are going to try and build it considering the physical facts concerning what harms people.
I don't accept that quality of life simply reduces to how someone feels about their situation at a given moment. there are objective facts about things that are likely to increase someones well being. I think the cases you are relying on are in the minority where someone is happy with poor circumstances
Which has to be about how they feel about things, otherwise the very idea of it doesn't make any sense.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yeah, I think it's clear that you don't and won't accept that. The problem is that factually, that's what it is.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Sure. But that doesn't change that quality of life simply reduces to how someone feels about their situation at a given moment. You won't be able to admit or see this, because you can't/won't accept it for some reason.
What physical benefits someone is not about what they feel.
Someone without access to clean water will be prone to disease. We know how to make environments that are at least physically healthy for people. Emotional well being is a more complicated matter but there can be facts of the matter.
You can manipulate someones mental states with drugs or brain interventions like deep brain stimulation and change the way they feel. It is not solely in their control.
Yes it is. There is no objective "benefit." There are different physical states. No state is objectively preferred to any other state. It's individual people who have preferences, who count one thing as desirable versus another, who count one thing as a benefit and another as a hindrance, who have goals and then desire for them to be met. The world outside of individual people thinking such things does nothing of the sort.
But I think there are also enough objective facts that influence quality that we don't need to make a judgement solely based on persons subjective testimony.
Sure. Again, I'm not at all denying that. The point is that "This is a benefit," "This is my quality of life," etc. are not objective circumstances. Those are judgments that individual people make. We can't conflate the judgments and objective things that may factor into the judgments. They're not the same thing.
But some physical states are functional and relied upon to keep a human body alive. No one could flourish in an environment that was lethal to the human body.
Before anyone can express a desire about their life they need to have come to exist and survived in an environment conducive to human well being.
Sure, and objectively, there's no preference for keeping human bodies alive. That only arrives via individual people desiring it.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Sure. But that doesn't make any state objectively preferable.
Did you ever adhere to Rand's Objectivism, by the way? Some of your comments seem as if they may have initially stemmed from views similar to hers re how she tries to bootstrap the idea of objective value.
I think even for people who consider life to be almost worthless they can still experience pain objectively and differentiate between levels of pain. So that even with a very poor quality life it can objectively be made worse and a very good quality of life may get even better.
I think biology does prove that there is ideal functioning of a human body and that organs can be defined by their ability to form a specific function.
The mind is a more complicated place and I think this is where the subjective defense or vagueness lies. But if we knew exactly how the brain and mind worked we could probably objectively manufacture well being here. Therapies and antidepressants already have positive effects for some people.
The fact that someone can only express a desire after their body has reached a certain level of functionality means that there is a certain necessary level of functionality required to even have this debate and make judgments, so these are things we are subservient to.
I see no reason to assume someone is right when they make a claim about their quality of life. I have given reasons why they could be wrong such as having false beliefs. But also I don't think someones personal judgement has that much power.
For example I might kidnap someone and they strongly desire not to be kidnapped but I easily overrule that. So in this sense someones life could be meaningful even if they reject the idea. Someone can be mentally ill and forced into hospital treatment and then their mental health improves and they have a better quality of life by force.
Sure. But again, what does that have to do with the idea of objective preferences?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Again, they're not right or wrong. Right and wrong are category errors for this.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
And I've explained that you're not actually arguing for being right or wrong about quality of life assessments. They can be right or wrong about their relative wealth, whether they have a disease, whether most people have some particular assessment, etc. None of that is being right or wrong about their assessment of their quality of life. They can also have different assessments at different times, and those assessments can change as they come to different beliefs about facts, or different mental health states, etc., but that doesn't amount to their assessments being right or wrong. Their assessment isn't the same as any of those other things.
Quality of life is a belief and beliefs can be false. You seem to be unjustifiably pinning quality of life down to one individual instance and how someone felt at that time.
So for example a woman may be very happy for a long period of time then the police knock on her door and tell her that her son has been killed in a road accident. She immediately feels distraught and suicidal and would rate her quality of life as terrible.
But a short while later the police come back and tell her they knocked on the wrong door and it is not her son that died.
Then she feels massive relief and is overjoyed. Now you are pinning her quality of life down down to that one instant when due to a false belief she felt awful and not on the all the moments of her life when she was not in that state. But the only reason she had this bad moment was a false belief.
However if a woman had been depressed for years and had a few months of happiness due to a romance before declining again I would accept that the overall quality of her life was poor.
I think the quality of someones life is caused by circumstances and not how they feel. Because feelings can be temporary and readjusted but overall quality of life throughout a person existence is a measure of how much positive things happened to them.
Presumably you wouldn't say that it's a belief about how someone feels or what their assessment of their life is, otherwise it wouldn't be any different than what they feel/what their assessment is.
So you'd say it's a belief about what, exactly?
I had a severe toothache once but during that time I did not have the belief that I had a poor quality of life. The judgement I have a poor quality is an overall assessment and substantial elements of this are based on objective fact.
I don't know how you are using the term subjective here but I do not think that everything subjective is only subjective. Some things might be entirely subjective but others things are both subjective and objective.
For example me imagining a magic green octopus is all subjective and in the imagination. Me believing I live in poverty is not.
Some things like pain require subjectivity even though there is no doubt the pain is real unlike the magic green octopus. Therefore the belief that people in severe pain have a poor quality of life is not an entirely subjective judgement. Just because pain is private does not mean it is not a fact.
You're not answering the question I asked. I don't know if you're doing that intentionally or not.
You said that you thought that "quality of life" was a belief, and a belief that people can get wrong.
I said that presumably you wouldn't say that it's a belief about how someone feels or what their assessment of their life is, otherwise it wouldn't be any different than what they feel/what their assessment is.
So you'd say it's a belief about what, exactly?
To answer my question, you'd have to tell me what you'd say it's a belief about.
An assessment of one's life is not purely subjective.
If someone cures cancer and saves millions of lives then there life had an immense impact on other peoples well being whatever they think.
Any belief can be false and Assessment is a belief. Like I said is if someone is happy because they think (or assess) that poverty has ended then that is an assessment based on a false belief and an emotion derived from a false belief.
I think what you are doing is giving a disproportionate importance to someones most trivial feelings.
How about the question I asked, and how about me pointing out in that last post that you didn't answer it?
I don't understand the question you are asking. Are you claiming an assessment is purely subjective? I don't accept that premise. An assessment involves a belief that can have truth or falsity. An emotion simply happens and cannot have truth or falsity..
So for example, if the person has a belief that their son or daughter died in a car accident, the belief is made true or false/right or wrong by the objective fact whether the son or daughter is still living or whether they're no longer living because of a car accident.
Re quality of life being a belief, it's made true or false/right or wrong by what (objective fact(s))?
Someone can assess their quality of life based on misinformation.
Someones quality of life can depend on objective facts and the access they have to them.
A person for example might think they have a great marriage because they are unaware their partner is being unfaithful to them.
If you know this persons spouse is unfaithful then you know that they have made a quality of life assessment based on misbelief.
We actually agree on all of that, but we're coming to completely different conclusions about it with respect to quality of life assessments and whether one can be wrong about them.
Do you understand why we're coming to different conclusions?
I think this might be the core of the issue. Quality of life is an objective measure, defined by psychologists, and their like. We only have to DuckDuckGo it to find this out.
But individuals - laymen and women - understand it quite differently, as a subjective measure of (roughly) how happy their lives make them, or some similarly vague concept. To the average person, quality of life is wholly about feelings, their feelings as to how good their lives are.
Hence the misunderstandings? :chin: :wink: :up: :smile:
You originally said:
Quoting Terrapin Station
I am saying this personal assessment is not everything and can be wrong. I am not reducing quality of life down to what one person thinks at one moment .
And I am not just referring to how someone feels at the time but to every scenario involved in life..
I am also including ethical considerations. I think if something like a genocide is occurring or people are happy whilst exploiting slaves then how they feel in that scenario has far less weight.
Like I think I said if you reduce quality of life and values down to how one person feels that is a nihilism where everyone else experiences are irrelevant.
I think it is a calculation probably where if millions of people are unhappy that should concern the whole of society where as if only one person is unhappy in a thousand people that can be treated as a personal issue. Another example is if one person is sick because the water is polluted that should concern everyone. I don't think one persons well being, or lack of, is self contained.
"No man is an Island" John Donne.
I agree. I think obviously we would want each individual to feel good about his or her life (I hope) and value their feedback. But like I said in my last post life is in a wider context.
Society effects well being and trends and stats. If you live in a low income high unemployment are you will often report worse outcomes.
Ii would not go up to someone and yell at them "you have a terrible quality of life". But I would be concerned about society as a whole and groups of vulnerable people.
It is a problem if a rich person feels great about his life and also does not want to give to charity or pay taxes then we would be tempted to intervene in his selfish but pleasurable quality of life.
Yes, and I'm still saying that.
Do you understand how I can say that and yet agree with everything in this post:
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I think that if someone thinks they have a great quality of life, but their spouse is cheating on them, then they have made a false assessment and their real quality of life is different.
I understand if you think quality of life is how someone feels at a given moment because that seems like all quality of life is, but it seems to me that our quality of life is actually based on other factors and the personal sentiments come after our quality of life has occurred.
For example if someone is hit over the head and then they claim they have a headache and poor quality of life, the poor quality of life is being hit over the head, not just how they felt after. If someone is chronically depressed the poor quality of life is an objective illness.
So I don't think poor quality of life is caused by a persons personal assessment. It is just obvious some scenarios will lead to people making a poor quality of life assessment.
You don't believe that a quality of life assessment is the same thing as whether their spouse is cheating on them, do you?
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.
The exceptions I would make is mental illnesses where the quality of life is the mental state. But even with mental illness it can be correlated with bad life circumstances.
Okay, so you do think it's the same thing.
Why would how the person feels about their spouse cheating on them be irrelevant to their quality of life? At the very least you'd be using language very oddly.
I think that there is a solipsistic feel to consciousness and perception though. But I don't think we can base societies and values coherently around that.
How do we get to non-personal quality?
Like I said in my last but one post the way they feel is dictated largely by their spouse cheating on them.
It might be that they are really happy to be cheated on but that would be a small minority of cases and an anomaly.
I am not sure if you are saying quality of life is only how someone feels, or whether you believe it is how someones feels and the circumstances that caused them to feel that way?
What does a personal quality mean?
Are you referring to individual conscious experience regardless of the functional state of the body and environment?
That.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
That's an empirical claim, and even with data, which you don't have--you're just making it up, basically--it still wouldn't be generalizable to everyone.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Of what relevance is how common something is?
"Personal" is a feature of quality period. Quality (of anything, in the value sense that we're talking about) is an assessment that individual people make.
If you want to claim that quality isn't personal, then you have some work to do. What is non-personal quality supposed to be?
This is just a bald assertion your making. Things have functions such as the human heart and there is telos they can be described in terms of. If a car is designed to travel on the road and fails to do that that is objective evidence of it's lack of quality.
Like I have said quality only exists in the context of their being an external world that effects the individual unless you are a solipsist. So someones personal feelings cannot constitute the entirety of anything.
It is relevant for making causal explanations and predictions.
If someone was going to cheat on their spouse they might not cheat on their spouse because of the evidence that it usually harms the spouse.
So they are making an assertion about how their behaviour will effect someones quality of life by using empirical statistics because there is a good causal case for certain actions leading to the same reaction except in a minority of cases.
This is how we can predict someones quality of life reliably by their circumstances.
You can say "It is not wrong, in my opinion, to stab someone" But you can't realistically say it is not harmful to stab someone. And even for a moral nihilist actions can be guided by an assessment of harm.
The problem with conceptual value claims is whether they have a reality out side of concepts. But Harm has a reality. You might even compare it to where mathematics exist in reality.
Of what relevance to whether quality of life is something that someone can get wrong.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.