Welfarism

Abstract

Welfarism is the belief/principle that social welfare depends (positively) only on individual welfare (or utility) levels. (Abstracting away the differences between utility and welfare, on which see Chapter 4. Questions of animal welfare and national boundary are also ignored.) Most people (including Sen) accept that individual welfares matter but many want to add other desiderata. While one may use any number of secondary instrumental principles, one can only have a single ultimate objective. Given a sufficiently wide domain of choice and sufficient differences in individual preferences, a conflict must arise with multiple ultimate objectives/principles, as exemplified by Sen’s (1970b) impossibility of a Paretian liberal. (See also Ng, 1982 on the impossibility of a Paretian X where X is any other principle.)