Academic

Download of the Week

By Lawrence Solum

The Download of the Week is Welfare as Happiness by John Bronsteen , Christopher J. Buccafusco and Jonathan S. Masur. Here is the abstract:

In the fields of law, economics, and philosophy, the leading conception of human welfare is preference-satisfaction - getting what one wants. An important rival is an objective list approach to ethics - possessing an enumerated set of capabilities. This Article argues against both major views and in favor of a third, defining welfare as subjective well-being - feeling good. We reject the leading approach on the ground that preferences are often mistaken or else involve goals independent of the individual's own welfare. When sophisticated preference-satisfaction theories launder out such preferences, those accounts reduce to our happiness-based approach. We reject objective list theories on the ground that they impose objective criteria, whereas an individual's well-being is a purely subjective concept. How good a person's life is for her cannot be judged by how well she satisfies someone else's standards of virtue or flourishing. By contrast with these theories, our hedonic approach captures the ordinary understanding of what it means for someone to have well-being, and it stands up better to analytical challenges than do its rivals. As a result, we advocate that administrative agencies replace cost-benefit analysis (the tool of the preference-based approach) with well-being analysis. Groundbreaking new research in hedonic psychology makes this possible, and we discuss how it can be accomplished.

And from the paper:

The problem with [Sen's objective] view [of well being] is that well-being is inherently subjective, not objective. The miserable person who uses her capabilities cannot reasonably be deemed better off than the happy person who does not. It is not clear what the metaphysical basis for Sen?s alternative objective judgment would be; and if the judgment relies upon intuition, it comes up short by that yardstick when pitted against our happiness-based conception of welfare. It grates strongly against standard intuitions to say that a person who constantly feels awful possesses great well-being because she happens to be engaged in activities that appear on a list made by others.

Highly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on May 09, 2009 (boomark / email).