Welfarism

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In ethics, welfarism is a theory that well-being, what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living, is the only thing that has intrinsic value. In its most general sense, it can be defined as descriptive theory about what has value but some philosophers also understand welfarism as a moral theory, that what one should do is ultimately determined by considerations of well-being. The right action, policy or rule is the one leading to the maximal amount of well-being. In this sense, it is often seen as a type of consequentialism, and can take the form of utilitarianism.

Contents

It is important for various discussions and arguments about welfarism how the nature of well-being is understood. Pure welfarists hold that this value is directly determined by the individual degrees of well-being of each entity. Impure welfarists, on the other hand, include other factors related to well-being, like whether the well-being is equally distributed among sentient entities. Hedonists try to give a more substantial account of well-being by holding that all and only experiences of pleasure and pain constitute someone's well-being. This view is rejected by desire theorists, who equate well-being with desire fulfillment. Objective list theories, on the other hand, also include objective or mind-independent factors as constituents of well-being.

Diverse arguments in favor of and against welfarism are found in the academic literature. Arguments in favor often focus on general intuitions about the importance of well-being concerning most evaluative judgments. Critics of welfarism frequently concentrate on specific counterexamples in which these general intuitions seem to fail, including cases of malicious pleasures, the value of beauty and art, and the so-called "repugnant conclusion". Criticisms are sometimes addressed specifically to welfarism itself, but they also often arise within discussions of other theories, like utilitarianism or hedonism, and are directed at welfarism only implicitly by concerning the welfarist aspects of these theories. [1] Some objections are directed specifically at pure welfarism but are avoided by impure welfarism. Welfarism has been influential in the fields of law and economics.

Definition

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. [1] In a more normative sense it consists of three theses: that individual well-being exists, that it has moral significance and that nothing else has moral significance. [2]

As theory of value

In this sense, welfarism is the view that well-being is the only thing that has value. [1] [3] The value in question is usually understood as intrinsic value or what is good in itself, [4] [5] as contrasted with extrinsic value, which belongs to things that are useful as a means for something else. [6]

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. [7] The well-being in question is usually understood in its widest sense, i.e. as the well-being not just of humans but of any sentient being. [8] This can be articulated by stating that the value of outcomes ultimately only depends on the benefits of each one affected. [7] Expressed in terms of possible worlds, welfarism holds that "the relative value of possible worlds is fully determined by how individuals are faring". [1] Expressed in terms of a function, welfarism is the thesis that "the relative goodness of alternative states of affairs must be based exclusively on, and taken as an increasing function of, the respective collections of individual utilities in these states". [3]

Welfarism as a theory of value can be interpreted as one theoretical commitment of utilitarianism together with consequentialism. [1] [9] Consequentialism is the theory that only acts leading to the best possible overall outcome are morally required or permissible. Consequentialism by itself leaves it open how to evaluate which of two possible outcomes is better. But this topic is addressed by welfarism. Combined, they constitute utilitarianism, [1] [9] i.e. the view that one should act as to produce "the greatest amount of good for the greatest number". [10]

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. [8] [7] 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. [7] [9] But welfarism, in its ethical sense, goes beyond this common-sense agreement by holding that, ultimately, well-being is the only thing that matters in terms of what one ought to do. This involves not just determining what is best but also includes the factor of what is in the agent's power to do, i.e. which possible actions are available to the agent. [3] In this sense, welfarism is usually seen as a form of consequentialism, which holds that actions, policies or rules should be evaluated on the basis of their consequences. [11]

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. [1] [9] 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. [1] [9] 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. [9]

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. [1]

Pure vs. impure welfarism

Among the different formulations of welfarism, it is possible to distinguish between pure and impure versions. [1] Pure welfarism holds that the value of a possible world only depends on the individual degrees of well-being of the different entities in it. Utilitarians, for example, focus on the sum total of everyone's well-being and hold that an action is right if it maximizes this sum total. [12] [11] 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. [1] [7]

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. [3] Egalitarians, on the other hand, argue that it is most important to increase the well-being of those that are generally worse off. [8] 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. [7] 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. [7] 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. [7]

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. [2] In its most general sense, well-being refers to what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living. [13] This is usually taken to imply a subjective component, i.e. that well-being always belongs to an individual and is expressed by how this individual feels. [2] Despite the common characterization in positive terms, well-being is normally understood as arising in degrees that may also be negative. [14] 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. [13] It is generally agreed that only sentient beings are capable of well-being. [2]

Theories of well-being try to give a more substantial account of what constitutes well-being besides the above-mentioned general characteristics. These theories can roughly be divided into hedonistic theories, desire theories, and objective list theories. [13] [15] [16]

Hedonist theories

Hedonists hold that all and only experiences of pleasure and pain constitute someone's well-being. [2] In this context, pleasure and pain are understood in the widest sense, i.e. as whatever feels good or bad. [17] [18] The paradigmatic cases are sensory experiences associated, for example, with sex or injury. [19] 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. [20] [13] 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. [2] 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. [2] Another counterexample is due to bad desires, the fulfillment of which would have terrible consequences for the agent. [13] 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. [2] [13]

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. [2] [15] 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. [13] [16] 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. [21] [22] [23] 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. [22] [23] [1] Such examples pose even more serious problems for welfarism since the pleasure seems to be good for the agent and thereby constitutes well-being while at the same time having a negative value. One response to this type of counterexample is to contend that malicious pleasures have positive value and to argue that the negative element does not concern the value simpliciter of the pleasure experience itself but the moral value of the person's character instead. [1]

Beauty

Another type of objection focuses on the value of beauty. [2] In this regard, it has been claimed that beautiful things possess a value that is independent of anyone's well-being. G. E. Moore, for example, holds that a world is better if it is beautiful than if it is ugly, even if it does not contain any sentient beings. [24] 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. [2] A similar argument against welfarism is due to Susan Wolf, who affirms that one cannot account for the value of great works of art by only focusing on the well-being they cause. [25] [1] Ben Bramble has objected to this line of argument by pointing out that great works of art can cause well-being in a variety of ways. These ways are not just restricted to the pleasure one takes while perceiving them but include other components, like the motivation to discover similar works of art or to share one's experience with friends. [26]

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. [2]

Different evaluations between subjective values

One more problem arises when comparing alternatives in which the well-being at stake does not belong to the same persons in both alternatives but to different persons. [1] This is the case, for example, when deciding whether it would be better for future generations to have a low number of people, each with a very high well-being, in contrast to a high number of people, each with a well-being that is just slightly positive. According to one perspective, what counts is the total well-being. On this view, having enough people with a slightly positive well-being would be better than having few people with a very high well-being. This view has been rejected by Derek Parfit, who termed it the "repugnant conclusion." [27] [28] 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. [1]

Distribution of well-being

Another criticism, directed specifically at pure welfarism, is based on a common intuition that morally good people deserve a high degree of well-being but morally bad people do not. [1] In this sense, the well-being of morally bad people would either be less valuable or even have a negative value. Immanuel Kant expresses a similar idea by stating that the highest good is "Virtue and happiness together ... in a person". [29] This point is also emphasized by W. D. Ross, who holds that "justice", defined as happiness in proportion to merit, is intrinsically valuable. [30] [31] [32] 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. [1]

One more objection that concerns pure welfarism in particular is due to the common impression that it is more important to increase the well-being of those that are worse off. [2] So when faced with the question of whether to raise the well-being of a happy person or an unhappy person, one should benefit the unhappy person. [33] [1] 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. [33] [1]

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. [34] 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. [35] 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

Related Research Articles

Axiology is the philosophical study of value. It includes questions about the nature and classification of values and about what kinds of things have value. It is intimately connected with various other philosophical fields that crucially depend on the notion of value, like ethics, aesthetics or philosophy of religion. It is also closely related to value theory and meta-ethics. The term was first used by Eduard von Hartmann in 1887 and by Paul Lapie in 1902.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Consequentialism</span> Ethical theory based on consequences

In moral philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgement about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism, falls under the broader category of teleological ethics, a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of intrinsic value. Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".

In ethical philosophy, ethical egoism is the normative position that moral agents ought to act in their own self-interest. It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people can only act in their self-interest. Ethical egoism also differs from rational egoism, which holds that it is rational to act in one's self-interest. Ethical egoism holds, therefore, that actions whose consequences will benefit the doer are ethical.

Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. The main branches of ethics include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.

Hedonism refers to the prioritization of pleasure in one's lifestyle, actions, or thoughts. The term can include a number of theories or practices across philosophy, art, and psychology, encompassing both sensory pleasure and more intellectual or personal pursuits, but can also be used in everyday parlance as a pejorative for the egoistic pursuit of short-term gratification at the expense of others.

Normative ethics is the study of ethical behaviour and is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates questions regarding how one ought to act, in a moral sense.

In its most common sense, philosophical methodology is the field of inquiry studying the methods used to do philosophy. But the term can also refer to the methods themselves. It may be understood in a wide sense as the general study of principles used for theory selection, or in a more narrow sense as the study of ways of conducting one's research and theorizing with the goal of acquiring philosophical knowledge. Philosophical methodology investigates both descriptive issues, such as which methods actually have been used by philosophers, and normative issues, such as which methods should be used or how to do good philosophy.

In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that ensure the greatest good for the greatest number. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is, in some sense, to maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility thus:

That property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness ... [or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.

Pleasure is experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something. It contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. It is closely related to value, desire and action: humans and other conscious animals find pleasure enjoyable, positive or worthy of seeking. A great variety of activities may be experienced as pleasurable, like eating, having sex, listening to music or playing games. Pleasure is part of various other mental states such as ecstasy, euphoria and flow. Happiness and well-being are closely related to pleasure but not identical with it. There is no general agreement as to whether pleasure should be understood as a sensation, a quality of experiences, an attitude to experiences or otherwise. Pleasure plays a central role in the family of philosophical theories known as hedonism.

In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action. It is sometimes described as duty-, obligation-, or rule-based ethics. Deontological ethics is commonly contrasted to consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and pragmatic ethics. In this terminology, action is more important than the consequences.

Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. Hence, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who has actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Desire</span> Emotion of longing for a person, object or outcome

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Well-being</span> General term for condition of individual or group

Well-being, or wellbeing, also known as wellness, prudential value, prosperity or quality of life, is what is intrinsically valuable relative to someone. So the well-being of a person is what is ultimately good for this person, what is in the self-interest of this person. Well-being can refer to both positive and negative well-being. In its positive sense, it is sometimes contrasted with ill-being as its opposite. The term "subjective well-being" denotes how people experience and evaluate their lives, usually measured in relation to self-reported well-being obtained through questionnaires.

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Negative consequentialism is a version of consequentialism, which is "one of the major theories of normative ethics." Like other versions of consequentialism, negative consequentialism holds that moral right and wrong depend only on the value of outcomes. That is, for negative and other versions of consequentialism, questions such as "what should I do?" and "what kind of person should I be?" are answered only based on consequences. Negative consequentialism differs from other versions of consequentialism by giving greater weight in moral deliberations to what is bad than what is good. Due to this, it can be considered an instance of what has been called "suffering-focused ethics", the view that the reduction of suffering has moral priority over any other possible duties we may think of.

<i>The Right and the Good</i> 1930 book by Scottish philosopher David Ross

The Right and the Good is a 1930 book by the Scottish philosopher David Ross. In it, Ross develops a deontological pluralism based on prima facie duties. Ross defends a realist position about morality and an intuitionist position about moral knowledge. The Right and the Good has been praised as one of the most important works of ethical theory in the twentieth century.

Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosophy. In the philosophy of science, he is notable for developing the regularity theory of causation, which in its strongest form states that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events without any underlying forces responsible for this regularity of conjunction. This is closely connected to his metaphysical thesis that there are no necessary connections between distinct entities. The Humean theory of action defines actions as bodily behavior caused by mental states and processes without the need to refer to an agent responsible for this. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It restricts the sphere of practical reason to instrumental rationality concerning which means to employ to achieve a given end. But it denies reason a direct role regarding which ends to follow. Central to Hume's position in metaethics is the is-ought distinction. It states that is-statements, which concern facts about the natural world, do not imply ought-statements, which are moral or evaluative claims about what should be done or what has value. In philosophy of mind, Hume is well known for his development of the bundle theory of the self. It states that the self is to be understood as a bundle of mental states and not as a substance acting as the bearer of these states, as is the traditional conception. Many of these positions were initially motivated by Hume's empirical outlook. It emphasizes the need to ground one's theories in experience and faults opposing theories for failing to do so. But many philosophers within the Humean tradition have gone beyond these methodological restrictions and have drawn various metaphysical conclusions from Hume's ideas.

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  28. ↑ Parfit, Derek (2016). "Can We Avoid the Repugnant Conclusion?". Theoria. 82 (2): 110–127. doi:10.1111/theo.12097.
  29. ↑ Lin, Cheng-Hao (2019). "The Ambiguity of Kant's Concept of the Highest Good: Finding the Correct Interpretation". The Philosophical Forum. 50 (3): 355–382. doi: 10.1111/phil.12228 . ISSN   1467-9191. S2CID   199304160.
  30. ↑ Simpson, David L. "William David Ross". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 12 January 2021.
  31. ↑ Skelton, Anthony (2012). "William David Ross". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 12 January 2021.
  32. ↑ Burgh, W. G. de (1931). "The Right and the Good. By W. D. Ross M.A., LL.D., Provost of Oriel College, Oxford. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. 1930. Pp. Vi + 176. Price 10s. 6d.)". Philosophy. 6 (22): 236–40. doi:10.1017/S0031819100045265. S2CID   170734138.
  33. 1 2 Ng, Yew-Kwang (1981). "Welfarism: A Defence Against Sen's Attack". The Economic Journal. 91 (362): 527–530. doi:10.2307/2232601. ISSN   0013-0133. JSTOR   2232601.
  34. ↑ Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, Fairness versus Welfare (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2002) ISBN   0-674-00622-4
  35. ↑ David Garland, "The Crisis of Penal Modernism", The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, pp. 53-73, University of Chicago Press (2002). ISBN   0226283844

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