Sumner on Welfare

Dialogue-Canadian Philosophical Review

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 571-577

  Sobel, David ^a  

^a BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85011497686     PISSN: 00122173     EISSN: 17590949     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300020503     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. “On the Subjectivity of Welfare,” Ethics, 107 (April 1997): 501–508.
2. Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Chapter 6 is especially helpful here.
3. A truly impressive and diverse list of ethicists have found the informed preference account of well-being congenial. I believe we can place on this list J. S. Mill, Richard Brandt, R. M. Hare, James Griffin, David Gauthier, John Rawls, Stephen Darwall, John Harsanyi, and Peter Railton. Robert Shaver's “Sidgwick's False Friends,” Ethics, 107 (January 1997): 314–20, effectively criticizes the common inclusion of Henry Sidgwick on this list.
4. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp. 111–12.
5. Some have complained that not only is the idealization severe, but that it introduces conceptual problems. See Don Loeb, “Full-Information Theories of Individual Good,” Social Theory and Practice, 21 (Spring 1995): 1–30;
6. Connie Rosati, “Persons, Perspectives and Full Information Accounts of the Good,” Ethics, 105 (January 1995): 296–325;
7. David Sobel, “Full Information Accounts of Well-Being,” Ethics, 104 (July 1994): 784–810;
8. and David Velleman, “Brandt's Definition of ‘Good,’” Philosophical Review, 97 (1988): 353–71.
9. Peter Railton, “Facts and Values,” Philosophical Topics, 14 (1986): 5–31. Actually, Railton (in conversation) agrees that, in order to avoid technical problems, the formulation should be amended to this: what is good for one is what one's informed self would intrinsically want one intrinsically to want. Additionally, some method of screening the preferences of the informed agent which stem from non-well-being-related motivational factors (such as moral motivation) must be devised.
10. James Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).