Welfare: Philosophical Aspects

Abstract

Welfare is a term often employed in moral and political philosophy. But it is a difficult term to define. Although it is linked closely to the term ‘utility,’ a distinction should be drawn between ‘welfare’ in the sense of ‘good’ and a technical notion of ‘utility’ (dominant within modern economics and decision theory) as ‘the value of a mathematical function used to represent preferences.’ Given that distinction, four different ways of thinking about human welfare are critically discussed, namely: hedonistic conceptions, which interpret welfare in terms of pleasures; preference-based conceptions, which interpret welfare in terms of choice behavior or desire-satisfaction; resource-based conceptions, which interpret welfare in terms of an objective list of valuable resources such as rights, commodities, job opportunities, and so on; and capability-based conceptions, which interpret welfare in terms of capabilities or freedoms to achieve valuable ends. It is suggested that a suitably laundered version of the preference-based approach might have appeal as a way to combine insights from the different conceptions. If so, and if the preferences can always be represented by technical utility functions, such a preference-based approach might take the form of a welfarist moral philosophy—one which relies exclusively on utility information for the construction of social or ethical preferences from any given set of personal preferences. But this is possible only if interpersonal comparisons of utility are possible. Otherwise, any appealing laundered preference-based approach to welfare must take the form of a nonwelfarist moral philosophy, in which nonutility information is used for the construction of social or ethical preferences.