Philosophy

Welfarism as a theory of value, welfare, and moral evaluation.

Philosophical welfarism asks a narrower question than it first appears to: not whether welfare matters, but whether welfare is the only thing that matters intrinsically to moral evaluation. Answering that question requires a theory of what welfare actually consists in — pleasure, preference satisfaction, or something else — before any claim about maximizing, distributing, or constraining it can get off the ground.

What this topic covers

• Competing theories of welfare: hedonism, preference satisfaction, objective list accounts
• Welfarism as distinct from (but often paired with) utilitarianism
• Thought experiments used to test theories of welfare, such as the experience machine
• Where welfarist and non-welfarist theories of value part ways