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.
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.
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. 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. 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. 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
- Consequentialism
- Economic stagnation
- Europeanism
- Juvenile delinquency
- Social welfare
- Social welfare function
- Welfare economics
- Utilitarianism
- Utility