Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis

Abstract

Matthew Adler, a law professor at Duke University, has written an amazing book in defence of a theory of well-being and a version of moral prioritarianism.1 He draws heavily on the framework and results of the theory of social choice, but he does so in an intuitive way with only a bare minimum of symbols. He also draws heavily on philosophical discussions of key issues, such as metaethics, personal identity and well-being. The net result is technically rigorous and philosophically insightful. Adler defends a very interesting extended-preference approach to the theory of well-being – one in which well-being is ratio-scale measurable and non-existence has value 0. Because he wisely allows that people may have different fully informed and rational extended preferences, well-being rankings need not be complete. Although this is a rich and important account of well-being, I shall focus, in what follows, on Adler’s discussion of moral issues.