Glossary
Core terms for navigating welfarism and adjacent fields.
welfarism
A family of views that gives welfare or well-being a central role in evaluation.
welfare economics
The branch of economics concerned with evaluating economic states by their effects on social welfare.
utilitarianism
A consequentialist family of theories commonly associated with maximizing aggregate welfare or utility.
well-being
How well a person's or sentient being's life is going for them, understood under a chosen theory.
social welfare function
A formal rule for aggregating individual welfare into an evaluative social criterion.
stakeholder governance
A governance approach that treats interests beyond shareholders as relevant to corporate decisions.
capability approach
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's framework evaluating welfare by what a person is actually able to do and be, not by resources or reported satisfaction alone.
functioning
In the capability approach, something a person actually does or is, such as being educated or well-nourished, as distinct from merely having the opportunity to.
hedonism (welfare theory)
The view that welfare consists entirely in pleasurable experience and the absence of pain.
preference satisfaction theory
The view that welfare consists in having one's preferences or desires satisfied, whether or not doing so produces any particular feeling.
objective list theory
The view that welfare consists in possessing a plurality of objectively good things, such as knowledge and achievement, independent of desire or pleasure.
experience machine
Robert Nozick's thought experiment involving a machine that simulates any experience, used to test whether welfare consists purely in felt experience.
interpersonal comparison of utility
The (contested) ability to compare welfare levels or changes across different people, required by most methods of aggregating individual welfare into a social measure.
Arrow's impossibility theorem
Kenneth Arrow's result that no rule for aggregating individual preference rankings into a social ranking can satisfy a small set of minimally fair conditions at once.
QALY
Quality-adjusted life year — a health-economics unit combining length and quality of life into a single measure used to compare treatments and set funding thresholds.
DALY
Disability-adjusted life year — a measure combining years of life lost to premature death and years lived with disability, used to assess disease burden across populations.
cost-effectiveness analysis
A method for comparing interventions by their cost per unit of outcome achieved, such as cost per QALY gained.
Human Development Index
A composite measure combining life expectancy, education, and income, introduced by the UN Development Programme as an alternative to GDP for assessing national welfare.
sentience
The capacity to have subjective experiences, particularly the capacity to suffer or experience positive states — the criterion most animal welfare theories use to determine moral status.
Five Freedoms
A widely used animal welfare framework: freedom from hunger and thirst, from discomfort, from pain and disease, to express normal behavior, and from fear and distress.
speciesism
Giving less moral weight to a being's interests purely because of its species membership, a term coined in the context of animal welfare ethics.
shareholder primacy
The view, associated with economist Milton Friedman, that a corporation's responsibility is to maximize shareholder value within the law, leaving broader social goals to government and individual choice.
stakeholder theory
R. Edward Freeman's framework holding that firms should account for the interests of employees, customers, communities, and other stakeholders, not shareholders alone.
prioritarianism
The view that welfare gains to people who are worse off should count for more, morally, than equal gains to those who are better off.
repugnant conclusion
Derek Parfit's result that simple total-welfare aggregation implies a sufficiently large population with lives barely worth living can be better than a smaller population living excellent lives — widely treated as a problem for the aggregation method that implies it.
moral status
The property of being the kind of entity whose interests must be given independent moral consideration, rather than being relevant only instrumentally.