Welfarism in moral theory

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 74, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 598-613

  Moore, Andrew ^a   Crisp, Roger ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039093658     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00048409612347551     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. In this context, the term 'welfarism' seems to have been coined by Amartya Sen, 'Utilitarianism and Welfarism', The Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979) pp. 463-489
2. The notion has little to do with the welfare state. Many variants of the basic idea of welfarism have been discussed in ethics. See, for example, the influential contrast between 'want-regarding' and 'ideal-regarding' principles in Brian Barry, Political Argument (London: Routledge, 1965) pp. 38-43
3. the 'philosophical utilitarianism' discussed in Thomas Scanlon, 'Contractualism and Utilitarianism' in A. Sen and B. Williams (eds.), Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 103-128
4. the 'Principle of Personal Good' defended in John Broome, Weighing Goods (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) ch. 8
5. and 'The Slogan' discussed in Larry Temkin, 'Harmful Goods, Harmless Bads' in R.G. Frey and C.W. Morris (eds.), Value, Welfare, and Morality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 290-324
6. and in Larry Temkin, Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp. 248-282
7. See also G.J. Warnock, The Object of Morality (London: Methuen, 1971)
8. J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), ch. 5
9. Bernard Williams, Morality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), the chapter entitled 'What is Morality About?'
10. Wayne Sumner, 'Two Theories of the Good', Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992) pp. 1-14
11. and James Griffin, 'The Ambitions of Consequentialism', Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992) pp. 118-132
12. In one sense of 'utility', at any rate. For helpful discussion of this multiply ambiguous notion, see John Broome, 'Utility', Economics and Philosophy 7 (1991) pp. 1-12
13. Our trichotomy derives from the one set out by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
14. Appendix I; and developed further by James Griffin in Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), part I
15. Both these philosophers note certain complications in the framework, and further reservations are expressed by Shelly Kagan in 'The Limits of Well-being', Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992) pp. 169-189. The more sophisticated contemporary theories of well-being typically draw on elements of several theory types, but we shall not pursue these complications here
16. Contemporary satisfaction theories of well-being are advanced by Richard Brandt, 'Two Concepts of Utility' in H.B. Miller and W.H. Williams (eds.), The Limits of Utilitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) pp. 169-185
17. R.B. Edwards, Pleasures and Pains: A Theory of Qualitative Hedonism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979)
18. Daniel Holbrook, Qualitative Utilitarianism (Lanham: University Press of America, 1988) chs. 2 and 3
19. T.L.S. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1988) chs. 5-7
20. and by Wayne Sumner in Abortion and Moral Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) ch. 5
21. and 'Welfare, Happiness, and Pleasure', Utilitas 4 (1992) pp. 199-223
22. Simple, unrestricted variants of the actual fulfilment theory are relatively rare among philosophers, but see Richard Taylor, Good and Evil (New York: Prometheus, 1984) pp. 126, 136
23. and R.B. Perry, General Theory of Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950) ch. 5
24. For influential variants of the hypothetical fulfilment theory, see Peter Railton, 'Moral Realism', The Philosophical Review 95 (1986) pp. 163-208
25. David Lewis, 'Dispositional Theories of Value', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 63 (1989) pp. 113-138
26. Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) pp. 1-2, 127, and chs. 6 and 17 ? though strictly speaking, Brandt understands his account to be a theory of what is good or rational, rather than a theory of welfare
27. and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) pp. 92-93, 421
28. The distinction between fulfilment and satisfaction is at least as old as W.D. Ross, The Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939) p. 300
29. A range of objective or ideal theories of the human good may be found in John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)
30. Panayot Butchvarov, Scepticism in Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) chs. 4 and 5
31. Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
32. and, with important qualifications, in Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Appendix I
33. and James Griffin, Well-being, part I
34. We owe the handy terminology of 'location' of good to John Broome, Weighing Goods, p. 1
35. See J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism (ed.) M. Warnock (London: Fontana, 1962) ch. 2, paragraph 10
36. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1907) pp. 113-114, fn. 2
37. Welfarism is a more modest doctrine than related humanistic principles. Compare, for example: 'the explanation and justification of the goodness or badness of anything derives ultimately from its contribution, actual or possible, to human life and its quality' (Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) p. 194)
38. and 'moral views essentially refer to human well-being' (Bernard Williams, Morality, p. 88)
39. In addition, we take welfarism to be a substantive thesis within normative ethical theory, whereas the humanistic view formulated by Williams is a much stronger meta-ethical constraint on anything's counting as a moral theory at all. Charles Taylor, 'Irreducibly Social Goods' in Geoffrey Brennan and Cliff Walsh (eds.), Rationality, Individualism, and Public Policy (Canberra: Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations, 1990) p. 63, goes further still, and attributes to welfarism the meta-ethical claim 'that all goods must be individual, that any other construal is incoherent ...' On our account, welfarism allows that theories made out fundamentally in terms of the protection of rights, or contracted principles of justice, or the individualistically irreducible value of community, can be perfectly coherent moral theories. Welfarism implies only that these are all substantively mistaken moral theories
40. G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903) ch. 3. The quotations are from pp. 97, 101, 99, 98 and 99, respectively. Within these quotations, we have substituted double quotation marks for the single quotation marks in the originals
41. Moore claimed that he did not comprehend the commonsense notion 'good for me'. Thomas Hurka has suggested to us in correspondence that Moore's argument is perhaps directed against the notion of 'agent-relative goodness' or 'goodness from a point of view', and not against the concept of well-being. If that is so, then so much the better for welfarism. But Moore must in fact have been arguing against the concept of individual welfare, interest, or well-being, for these are the concepts central to the egoism which was his primary target. Hurka has also argued recently for the Moorean thesis that talk of '"good for" is fundamentally confused, and should be banished from moral philosophy'. His reason is that the notion can be comprehended in too many different ways to be of philosophical service. In this paper, we comprehend 'good for' in one way only, as 'individual well-being'. For Hurka's discussion, see his '"Good" and "Good for"', Mind 96 (1987) pp. 71-73
42. The Morality of Freedom, p. 317
43. D. Regan, 'Authority and Value', Southern California Law Review 62 (1989)pp. 995-1095, esp. p. 1041
44. 'Authority and Value', p. 1046
45. Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987) p. 39. In one way, Sen-welfarism is narrower than the view we are discussing, since it concerns only goodness, whilst our version concerns moral significance generally. In another way, Sen-welfarism is broader, since his utility or welfare information includes information about how welfare is distributed between people
46. The issue is complicated by Sen's use of at least three different conceptions of utility: (i) in 'Plural Utility', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 80 (1980-81) pp. 193-215
47. (ii) in 'Utilitarianism and Welfarism', p. 463, however, he says that 'utility will be taken to stand for a person's own conception of his well-being'; (iii) Sen uses the notion of utility primarily to refer to pleasure and desire-satisfaction
48. see e.g., On Ethics and Economics, p. 45. It is this third and central usage with which we shall primarily be concerned
49. See A. Sen, On Ethics and Economics, p. 45
50. Commodities and Capabilities (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985) p. 21
51. The name of the argument we take from D. Crocker, 'Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Sen's and Nussbaum's Development Ethic', Political Theory 20 (1992) pp. 548-612, 601
52. 'Plural Utility', p. 207
53. This conception of utility is in fact at least as old as most of the fulfilment versions taken seriously today. See e.g., Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), vol. I, ch. 7. And it has at least an equal claim to ancient roots
54. 'Well-being, Agency and Freedom', p. 186
55. 'Well-being, Agency and Freedom', p. 204
56. 'Well-being, Agency and Freedom', p. 201
57. see also Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) pp. 42-43
58. In his The Standard of Living (ed.) G. Hawthorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) p. 29
59. Sen suggests that his project consists in listing those objects of value in a person's life which constitute their standard of living. See also 'Capability and well-being' in A. Sen and M. Nussbaum (eds.), The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) pp. 32-33
60. Elsewhere Sen suggests that functionings are posterior to having goods, but prior to utility (Commodities and Capabilities, p. 10-11)
61. Thus, my cycling depends on my having a bike, but the pleasure of cycling depends on my cycling. This structure is, of course, dependent on the narrow conception of utility. An objective theorist of welfare might collapse the distinction between functionings and utility, so that my welfare might be constituted partly both by the activity of cycling and the pleasure I obtain from it. Collapsing this distinction, we believe, will add to the coherence of the objective account. A similar response can be made to G.A. Cohen's suggestion that Sen's theory makes advances on two separate fronts, first, by taking into account what a person can do as well as what she does, and, second, by not reducing evaluation to the assessment of resources or levels of utility. An objective theory, by focusing on what ultimately makes a person well off, makes these advances without creating artificial distinctions. See G.A. Cohen, 'Equality of what? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities' in The Quality of Life, pp. 20-21. Just as the notion of welfare can cover both the well-being and agency aspects of Sen's account, so it can include on the same level what Cohen describes as 'active' and 'passive' aspects, that is, what people extract from resources (such as accomplishment) and what they receive from resources (such as pleasure)
62. See e.g., A. Sen, 'Equality of What?' reprinted in his Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) pp. 353-369, 366
63. 'Well-being, Agency and Freedom', p. 200
64. Inequality Reexamined, p. 110
65. See James Griffin, Well-Being, pp. 27-30, 67-68
66. 'Well-being, Agency and Freedom', p. 213
67. A. Sen, 'Rights and Agency', Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1981) pp. 3-39
68. A. Sen, 'Evaluator Relativity and Consequential Evaluation', Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1982) pp. 113-132
69. On this common confusion, see Roger Crisp, 'Motivation, Universality and the Good', Ratio 6 (1993) pp. 181-190, esp. pp. 188-189
70. and 'The Duality of Practical Reason', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1996) pp. 53-73, esp. pp. 60-61. It quite possibly lies behind Regan's puzzlement over Jones, and Moore's over the egoist (see section II above). The fact that the fellowship in physics will be mine may not make it more valuable; but it does give me a reason to pursue it
71. 'Evaluator Relativity and Consequential Evaluation', p. 118
72. See also Larry Temkin, 'Harmful Goods, Harmless Bads'
73. and Jeff McMahan, 'Killing and Equality', Utilitas 7 (1995) pp. 1-29
74. 'Utilitarianism and Welfarism', pp. 472-474
75. A. Sen 'The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal', Journal of Political Economy 78 (1970) pp. 152-157
76. 'Equality of What?', p. 364
77. Ironically, one of the clearest defences of the value of community against welfarism comes in the work of the ideal utilitarian Donald Regan: 'community is an objective, intrinsic good, something valuable in itself (and not merely valuable for the members of the community), which contributes to the value of the universe in which it occurs . . . [it is] friendship writ large, insofar as that is possible over a polity' ('Authority and Value', p. 1047). Our response is essentially the one we have already given in section II to Regan's case of the physicist Jones
78. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.8, 1099a33-b6. Aristotle himself counted wealth among the purely instrumental goods, and good looks among the conditions for happiness
79. C. Taylor, 'Essentially Social Goods', pp. 56-57
80. Will Kymlicka argues in Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) ch. 8, that cultural membership is a 'primary good' in Rawls' sense. It is perfectly coherent to make the stronger claim that such membership is valuable because it is a constituent of individual well-being
81. Larry Temkin describes the view that such distributions are bad as the 'deep and (for them) compelling view'of egalitarians. See Inequality, p. 13
82. Diogenes Laertius, 7.101-3, trans. in A.A. Long and D. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), vol. 1, p. 354