Welfarism – The Very Idea

Abstract

According to outcome welfarism, roughly, the value of an outcome is fundamentally a matterof the individual welfare it contains. I assess various suggestions as to how to spell out this idea more fully on the basis of some basic intuitions about the content and implications of welfarism. I point out that what are in fact different suggestions are often conflated and argue that none fully captures the basic intuitions. I then suggest that what this means is that different doctrines of welfarism may be appropriate in different contexts and that when deciding on a particular doctrine, we need to consider which intuitions it does (and does not) accommodate. Finally, I consider the issue of just how a benefit must be related to an outcome in order to contribute to its value.