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Sumner on Welfare*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

David Sobel
David Sobel
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University
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Extract

L. W. Sumner's excellent book Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics has four central goals. He aims (1) to demonstrate the subjectivity of welfare (chaps. 1 to 3); (2) to show that the traditional subjective accounts of welfare—namely, hedonism and preference theories—are inadequate (chaps. 4 and 5); (3) to construct an alternative subjectivist account of welfare (chapter 6); and (4) to argue for the moral primacy of welfare (chap. 7). I will not comment here on Sumner's treatment of the subjectivity of welfare, as I have had my say on this topic elsewhere. In fact, my space here will only permit me to discuss the second and fourth goals of the book. Even with this narrow focus, I will be forced to leave unexplored a wealth of truly lovely work which passes by us on the road to these central conclusions.

Type
Critical Notice/Étude critique
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , Summer 1998 , pp. 571 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1998

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References

Notes

1 “On the Subjectivity of Welfare,” Ethics, 107 (April 1997): 501–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Brandt, Richard, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Chapter 6 is especially helpful here.Google Scholar

3 A truly impressive and diverse list of ethicists have found the informed preference account of well-being congenial. I believe we can place on this list J. S. Mill, Richard Brandt, R. M. Hare, James Griffin, David Gauthier, John Rawls, Stephen Darwall, John Harsanyi, and Peter Railton. Shaver's, Robert “Sidgwick's False Friends,” Ethics, 107 (January 1997): 314–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, effectively criticizes the common inclusion of Henry Sidgwick on this list.

4 Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp. 111–12.Google Scholar

5 Some have complained that not only is the idealization severe, but that it introduces conceptual problems. See Loeb, Don, “Full-Information Theories of Individual Good,” Social Theory and Practice, 21 (Spring 1995): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosati, Connie, “Persons, Perspectives and Full Information Accounts of the Good,” Ethics, 105 (January 1995): 296–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sobel, David, “Full Information Accounts of Well-Being,” Ethics, 104 (July 1994): 784–810CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Velleman, David, “Brandt's Definition of ‘Good,’” Philosophical Review, 97 (1988): 353–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Railton, Peter, “Facts and Values,” Philosophical Topics, 14 (1986): 5–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Actually, Railton (in conversation) agrees that, in order to avoid technical problems, the formulation should be amended to this: what is good for one is what one's informed self would intrinsically want one intrinsically to want. Additionally, some method of screening the preferences of the informed agent which stem from non-well-being-related motivational factors (such as moral motivation) must be devised.

7 I defend this view in “Well-Being as the Object of Moral Concern” (forthcoming in Economics and Philosophy). One motivation for such a view is that promoting only an agent's well-being does not adequately respond to the full range of an agent's non-moral concerns.

8 One example will have to serve. Consider Sumner's brilliant suggestion that, “Although it is easy to find philosophers who count themselves as objectivists about welfare, it is surprising how few of them have anything like a genuine theory to offer. Recall the distinction … between the nature of welfare and its sources. We are seeking an explication of the former not merely a list or inventory of the latter. Yet such a list is all that most objectivists give us. ‥ [Therefore such Objective List Theories] provides no formal theory [of welfare] which could stand as an alternative to subjectivism” (pp. 45–46).

9 Griffin, James, Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).Google Scholar