The Concept of Welfare
(An excerpt from Christopher C. Heathwood, “Desire-satisfaction theories of welfare.” (2005). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 – February 2014. 2395.)
Key Concepts
Theories of welfare (or well-being)
Intrinsic goods
Among the greatest and oldest of questions in the history of western philosophy is, What makes a person’s life go well for him? In other words, What things are good in themselves for a person? We ask the same question when we wonder in what human welfare consists.
As a measure of how well we are faring, welfare is something we care about long before we enter the philosophy room. When we confront important decisions in our lives – where to go to college, what career to choose, whether to marry, in what part of the country to live – we may consider which of one’s alternatives is most in one’s interest – that is, which one maximizes one’s welfare. Many moral and social emotions, such as envy, compassion, love, and greed, are bound up with the concept of welfare. For instance, it may be that to love someone is, in part, to wish him well.
The idioms of welfare are many. We speak of well-being, of benefit, of doing well, of advantage, of something being one’s interest. We speak of quality of life, of a life well worth living, of the good life. We speak of harm, sacrifice, and disadvantage. Each of these concepts is analytically connected to the concept of welfare. Whenever we make a judgment using one of them, the concept of welfare is involved.
Theories of welfare (or well-being) should do several things. They should identify the fundamental source or sources of positive and negative welfare. To Illustrate, traditional forms of hedonism maintain that pleasure is the fundamental, intrinsic good for a subject and pain the fundamental, intrinsic evil.
Since we are interested in making comparisons between different items…in terms of their value for some person, a theory of welfare should include quantitative principles. It should identify the factors that determine how intrinsically good an intrinsically good thing would be for someone. A classical form of hedonism, for instance, may claim that the intrinsic value of a pleasure is a function of its duration and intensity.
It might then go on to claim that the intrinsic value of a larger item, such as a person’s entire life, is simply the sum of the intrinsic values of all the pleasures and pains within that life. But we should not assume straightaway that the value of a whole life must be “built up” in this way out of the values of its parts. It may be that certain relatively simple states of affairs have certain values, and that certain complex states of affairs built out of them also have certain values, but that the values of the complex wholes are in no way determined by the values of the smaller parts.
Questions for Further Thought…
Which would you prefer (if either): being sad for the first half of your life, and happy for the second half, or being happy for for the first half of your life, and sad for the second?
What does your answer reveal about your stance on whether the quality of a whole life is completely determined by the qualities of its parts?