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AI Recursive Self-Improvement: Risks to Human Welfare and How Welfarism Can Help
What recursive self-improvement in AI could mean for humanity, and why welfare-economic reasoning offers a practical framework for managing the risk under deep uncertainty.
Aggregation vs. Priority: How Should Welfare Gains Be Weighed?
Simple aggregation, prioritarianism, egalitarianism, and rights-based constraints — four different answers to how welfare gains and losses should be weighed against each other.
Can Machines Have Welfare? An Emerging Debate
Why artificial systems raise the question of moral status differently than animals do, and why the uncertainty itself is starting to matter for AI governance.
Sentience, Suffering, and the Case for Animal Welfare
Why sentience became the central criterion for animal welfare, and how welfare science tries to measure it empirically.
Stakeholder Theory and the Purpose of the Corporation
Milton Friedman's shareholder primacy doctrine, Edward Freeman's stakeholder theory, and the institutional responses caught between them.
From GDP to Human Development: Measuring Welfare Beyond Income
Why income-based measures of welfare fall short, and how the Human Development Index and subjective well-being research try to fill the gap.
QALYs, DALYs, and the Economics of Health Policy
How health economists operationalize welfare comparisons to allocate scarce medical resources, and the ethical objections the approach faces.
Social Welfare Functions and the Problem of Interpersonal Comparison
Why turning individual welfare into a single social ranking runs into deep formal obstacles, from interpersonal comparability to Arrow's impossibility theorem.
Hedonism vs. Preference Satisfaction: Two Theories of Welfare
The two leading accounts of what welfare actually consists in, and the thought experiments used to test each one.
The Capability Approach: Rethinking What Welfare Means
Why Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum argued that welfare should be measured in capabilities rather than resources or utility.
Welfarism and Utilitarianism: What Is the Difference?
A careful introduction to the relationship between welfarism and utilitarianism.