Welfarism

As a descriptive theory of value, welfarism provides a general framework for answering questions of value, such as which choices are good or which of two alternatives is better. As theory of value In this sense, welfarism is the view that well-being is the only thing that has value. The value in question is usually understood as intrinsic value or what is good in itself, as contrasted with extrinsic value, which belongs to things that are useful as a means for something else. Welfarism implies that any two outcomes that are identical in terms of well-being have the same value, no matter how much they differ otherwise. As a moral theory It is commonly accepted by many ethical theories that considerations of well-being play an important role for how one should act. Some authors see welfarism as including the ethical thesis that morality fundamentally depends on the welfare of individuals. For example, by learning that one alternative is better in terms of well-being than another, an agent usually has a reason to act such as to bring about the first rather than the second alternative. One argument commonly cited in favor of welfarism is that nothing would be good or bad in a world without sentient beings. So it would not matter whether such a world had clean water, global warming or natural disasters. The reason for this is that, according to welfarism, there would be neither positive nor negative well-being: nothing would matter because nothing had an impact on anyone's well-being. Another argument is that many of the things commonly seen as valuable have a positive impact on someone's well-being. In this sense, health and economic prosperity are valuable because they tend to increase overall well-being. On the other hand, many things seen as bad, such as disease or ignorance, tend to have a negative impact on well-being, either directly or indirectly. There are also various indirect arguments for welfarism in the form of criticisms of the theoretical competitors of welfarism. It is sometimes claimed that some of them fail either to properly draw the distinction between what is valuable at all and what is ultimately valuable or to take all consequences into account. == Types ==

Within welfarism, there are disagreements as to the exact way in which well-being determines value. For this reason, theorists often distinguish different types of well-being. Impure welfarism, on the other hand, involves other factors related to well-being as well. These factors can include whether the well-being is distributed equally among the entities and to what degree the entities deserve the level of well-being they have. Weak paretianism One of the least controversial forms of welfarism is called weak paretianism. It holds that one state is better than another state if it is better for everyone involved: if everyone's well-being is higher in the first state. However, that principle remains quiet on cases where a trade-off is involved: if the well-being of some is increased while it is decreased for others. Egalitarians, on the other hand, argue that it is most important to increase the well-being of those that are generally worse off. This idea can be captured by a prioritarianist approach that takes everyone's well-being into account but gives greater weight to the well-being of those who fare worse. One argument against this type of approach is that it strays away from the original intuition driving welfarism: that well-being is the only thing intrinsically valuable. But equality is a relation between entities and not intrinsic to any of them. An important requirement usually associated with welfarist theories is that they ought to be agent-neutral. According to agent-neutrality, it should not matter to whom the well-being belongs but only that it is higher or better distributed overall. == Nature of well-being ==

Central to many discussions of welfarism is the question concerning the nature of well-being. In many cases, it depends on one's conception of well-being whether a certain argument for or against welfarism is successful. The term "well-being" is often used synonymously with other terms like personal good, being in the agent's interest, prudential value, eudaimonia and utility. Hedonist theories Hedonists hold that all and only experiences of pleasure and pain constitute someone's well-being. The paradigmatic cases are sensory experiences associated, for example, with sex or injury. But it also includes other types of experiences, like the intellectual joy at grasping a new theory or like suffering an existential crisis. Desire theories According to desire theories, well-being consists in desire-fulfillment or getting what one wants. In many concrete cases, hedonists and desire theorists are in agreement since desire-fulfillment and pleasure often go hand in hand: getting what one wants tends to be pleasurable, just as failing to get what one wants tends to be unpleasant. But there are a few exceptions where the two come apart. This is the case, for example, when the agent does not know that one of their desires has already been fulfilled. Another counterexample is due to bad desires, the fulfillment of which would have terrible consequences for the agent. To avoid these counterexamples, some desire theories focus not on what the agent actually wants but what the agent would want if they were well informed. Objective list theories Objective list theories stand in contrast to hedonism and desire theories in that they include objective factors that are independent of the agent's mental states. Such factors can include friendship, having virtues or perfecting human nature. Objections to objective list theories often center on the plausibility of the claim that subject-independent factors can determine a person's well-being even if the person does not care about these factors. For example, it is questionable whether having friends would improve the well-being of someone who does not care about friendship. == Criticism ==

Pleasure An important argument against welfarism concerns the value of pleasure. There is very wide agreement among welfarists that pleasure is either the only or at least one central constituent of well-being. The problem arises due to the fact that not all pleasures seem to be equally valuable. Traditionally, this debate focused on the difference between lower and higher pleasures. John Stuart Mill, for example, argued that the lower pleasures of the body are less valuable than the higher pleasures of the mind. On this view, the pleasure one takes in studying a philosophical theory is more valuable than the pleasure one takes from eating at one's favorite restaurant, even if the degrees of these two pleasures should be equal. If true, this would pose an important objection to pure welfarism since it points to a rift between the degree of well-being and value. But this problem may be avoided by impure welfarism. In the contemporary debate, it has been suggested that some forms of pleasure even have a negative value, for example, malicious pleasures like schadenfreude. But not everyone shares Moore's intuition concerning this example. In this sense, it has been argued that the value of beauty lies not in the beautiful object by itself but in the positive experience of it. Definition of well-being A different line of argument suggests that welfarism is false since, strictly speaking, there is no well-being. The underlying idea of this thesis is that well-being is what is good for someone. Based on this definition, G. E. Moore argues that there is no well-being since goodness cannot be restricted to a person in this sense, i.e. there is good or bad in an absolute sense but there is no good or bad for someone. Another solution holds that what matters is not the total well-being but the average well-being. On this view, the alternative concerning few people with a very high well-being would be preferable. This point is also emphasized by W. D. Ross, who holds that "justice", defined as happiness in proportion to merit, is intrinsically valuable. Impure welfarists can accommodate this intuition by holding that the well-being of morally bad people has less value. But this adjustment is not available to pure welfarism. This intuition seems to be based on the idea that what matters is not just a high total well-being, as suggested by pure welfarism, but also an equal distribution. One way to explain the initial intuition is to formulate the problem not in terms of well-being but in terms of resources. In this sense, giving one hundred dollars to a poor person would be better than giving it to a rich person. This can be explained by pure welfarism since the same amount of resources would mean more to the poor person and thereby have a bigger impact on their well-being. == Influence ==

In law and economics Welfarist views have been influential in the law and economics movement. Steven Shavell and Louis Kaplow, for example, have argued in Fairness versus Welfare that welfare should be the exclusive criteria by which legal analysts evaluate legal policy choices. Penal welfarism is a theory in the study of criminal justice which holds that prisoners should have the right and the positive motivation to gain opportunities for advancement within the criminal justice system. Economists usually think of individual welfare in terms of utility functions, a perspective in which social welfare can be conceived as an aggregation of individual utilities or utility functions. ==See also==