Pages

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Another reading on Welfarism and Utilitarianims




Welfarism and Utilitarianism


Welfarism is the major concern in this paper and its relationship to utilitarianism. This unique perspective of utilitarianism is not necessarily presented when one begins to discuss classical utilitarianism and consequentialism. Health care research and outcome research are major tools for making health care policies. Cost- benefit and cost effectiveness studies are utilitarian in nature. However, these tools are often incomplete. Researchers acknowledge that the research is often biased. They also acknowledge that many research projects neglect segments of the population and many times the same sub-groups. This has raises many ethical questions and concerns. Feminist groups often complain that many research projects do not consider the concerns and needs of women. Rawls is in complete disagreement with utilitarianism with respect to the moral value of justice. Welfarism considers two outcomes when considering which is best for the majority and leaves out non-welfare information, which is always necessary when considering the whole of humanity. Paretianism is not sufficient either in that it may only consider one or two non-welfare functions in the two vectors. The purpose of this paper is look at authors who advocate either one of these perspectives, but who are in total contrast to Rawls who believes that utilitarianism can never be a successful moral theory.

When John Rawls critiques Utilitarianism in “Classical Utilitarianism”, A Theory of Justice, he does not specifically mention the concept welfarism that had not appeared in the literature. However, his major moral concerns about the theory are representative of the some of the concepts found in welfarism. Rawls major concerns are, (1) utilitarianism does not take into account how benefits and burdens are distributed in society, (2) utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons and (3) utilitarianism does not take into account the nature of the desires being satisfied. The above-mentioned critiques of Rawls are explicitly stated in “An Examination of John Rawls’ Critique of Utilitarianism” by Jon Williams, (Copyright Jon Williams, 2001.jcwilli3@eos,nscu.edu.).

While welfarists claim that morality is fundamentally a matter of the well-being of individuals, Rawls would not disagree. However, welfarism and its corollary, parietianism, do not include non-utility variables in the formula, which Rawls believes are necessary for distributive justice. In the current literature, those who come to the defense of welfarism are often economists who consider welfarism and its moral content secondary to economic models.

Nils Holtug in “Welfarism-The Very Idea” acknowledges that Amartya Sen coined the phrase welfarism, but that there may be currently different versions of the theory. Holtug asserts that welfarism is related to the theory of outcome value. Morality is a matter of the well-being of individuals and that the value of outcomes is an important consideration in this well-being. Holtug distinguishes that several definitions have been suggested for welfarism, but in his exposition wants to clarify the conditions that a principle should satisfy to qualify as welfarist, whether plausible or not. Amartya Sen coined the term to mean the doctrine that the value of an outcome is an increasing function only of individual benefits. Welfarism, is a new term and philosophers only have basic intuitions about its contents and implications. Holtug asserts that there is a basic set of intuitions that can be discerned.

Holtug clarifies four conditions for the meaning of welfarism. They are (1) the core welfarist intuition should flesh out that the value of outcomes is fundamentally a matter of individual benefits; (2) welfarism should not rely on any moral ideals that are neither referred to or implied by this or similar formulations; (3) utilitarianism and other theories that take individual benefits should be the currency of distribution and ;(4) the final condition is that its meaning should provide a principled and useful distinction between welfarists and-non-welfarists. Holtug asserts that none of the standard versions of welfarism completely satisfies these four conditions. When different versions of welfarism are used, they may be appropriate for different purposes and the conditions that he clarifies may not necessarily be announced. If welfarism fails any of these conditions, it is not abundantly clear because there is no single accepted definition of the term. The author acknowledges that Sen coined the phrase as the doctrine that the value of an outcome is an increasing function only of individual benefits. Many definitions of the term have emerged and it is plausible that any of these definitions would not necessarily sanction the four conditions that Holtug has set forth.
is is apparent in an article written by Robert Shaver, The Appeal of Utilitarianism, it appears that welfare takes on a different connotation. “I take welfare to be the concept of which hedonism, preference satisfaction, or perfectionism are the usual specifications”, p 237. He also substitutes welfare for utilities. He suggests that utilitarianism survives because it values welfare and nothing else and in fact, welfare must be a necessary part of the content of morality. It is a theory that appeals to our benevolence. This definition may not satisfy the aforementioned conditions.


Sen has what might be called a standard version of welfarism that might not satisfy these four conditions. “Welfarism is the view ‘that the judgment of the relative goodness of alternative states of affairs must be based exclusively on, and taken as an increasing function of, the respective collections of individual utilities in these states”, ‘Utilitarianism and Welfarisim’, Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979) p. 468.
It is important to consider the relationship between the value of an outcome and the benefits contained in the outcome. This is idea is supported by the suggestion that welfarism is the monistic doctrine that only benefits have intrinsic value. The other suggestion is the value of an outcome is a function only of individual benefits. A corollary of these suggestions is that some definitions of welfarism insinuate that there are values other than benefits that contribute to the intrinsic value of outcomes.

Monistic outcome welfarism is one way to help clarify that outcome values are fundamentally a matter of individual benefits. Utilitarianism is characterized as a welfarist view and is seen in outcome utilitarianism, outcome welfare egalitarianism and outcome welfare priortarianism. The operative in the three aforementioned views is outcome. Outcome utilitarianisms assert that the larger a sum of individual benefits an outcome contains, the better it is. Only outcomes have intrinsic values. The larger the sum of such value, the better.  

As Holtug credits Sen as being the father of Welfarism, it is necessary to recapitulate here what Sen believes to be the major components of the theory. In the article Utilitarianism and Welfarism, his intention is give a critique of utilitarianism, while not discrediting consequentialism. He explicates the relationship between the goodness and states of affairs and the utility of those states. Utility can be understood as a person’s conception of his own well-being, pleasure or desire, but not necessarily a definitional link with the goodness of states of affairs. He specifically identifies outcome utilitarianism as the goodness of a state of affairs (outcome) with the sum total of individual utilities in that state. Holtug, in his definition, agrees.

He defines welfarism as, “any two states of affairs that are identical in terms of individual utility characteristics must be judged to be equally good no matter how different they are in non-utility respects. Any state that has more utility for someone and less utility for anyone in comparison with another state is a better state than the other”, p 464. It is in section three of his paper that he deals specifically with welfarism, i.e., welfarism as outcome morality. It is an informational constraint in making judgments about alternative states of affairs. It also states that when personal utility information about two states of affairs is known, and then those two states of affairs can be judged without non-utility information. Even though this does not preclude its use, it is here that Rawls and Sens are in agreement with one of the major flaws of utilitarianism, i.e., important considerations are left out of the calculations. The two general approaches of that Sen discusses for maximizing the sum of each person’s utilities are a Mirrleesian approach with egalitarian considerations where simple utilitarianism and utility based version of maximizing the sum of some particular concave transformation of each person’s utilities. The other approach that is not Mirrleesian is judging the welfare of the society in terms of the utility of the median person in the utility ranking. What is important in understanding welfarism as described by Sen is the sufficiency of the informational constraint for moral judgments of states of affairs.
Blackoby, Bossert and Donaldson, in “In Defense of Welfarism”, discuss welfarism as a normative view that lies behind neoclassical welfare economics. They agree that welfarist principles rank social alternatives, e.g. liberty, freedom of expression and a healthy environment with regard to individual well-being. This article states that Sen has criticized welfarism on the grounds that preferences and desires may not always be consistent with well-being. They also mention that parietian compensation focus on preferences as expressed in market behavior. In defense of welfarism, thy believe that non-welfare information is implicitly fixed and that it is impossible to discern the way in which a principle makes use of it. Social and individual non-welfare information may vary across information profiles, where each information profile includes a vector of individual utility functions. Individual-specific non-welfare information may include length of life and other variables that may make it difficult to make the chosen state of affairs do-able.

In health care research, a researcher may have a specific outcome and use a regression model to understand the variance of the independent variables. It is difficult to control all of the variables that may be deemed important. Demographics variables are universally considered in these social science research projects. Often, the researchers may have to leave out an independent variable that may be extremely important, because its addition in the formula may complicate the results and give a less accurate result. Researchers accept this fact and explain this in their conclusions. However, it is disturbing for some that even excellent research projects often don’t include important data across all the social strata of our society. Utilitarianism ad welfarism do not give satisfying responses for many ethicists as to the resolution of this problem.

lackoby. et al speak of conventional social-choice theory where multiple profiles of utility non-welfare information are implicitly fixed. They also employ the mathematical language of vectors, axioms, functions and permutations when speaking of utility profiles and non-utility characteristics. In a setting such as this, a strong case for welfarism is made. They also claim that a social evaluation function is associated with an order of the alternatives with each possible information profile. This is welfarist if the ranking of any two alternatives is given by the ranking of the corresponding utility vectors. They also speak of an anonymous welfarism where the social ordering will be unaffected by a permutation of utility functions across individuals with non-welfare information unchanged. All permutations of any utility are equally good. Even though non-welfare characteristics can justify special consideration, the anonymity axiom requires that if both the utility function and individual non-utility-functions are permuted, the social ordering are both unaffected. 

A strong case is made in favor of welfarism when one uses an independence axiom with consideration of both welfare and non-welfare information, with non-welfare information being held. This non-welfare information may be as the authors states, length of life, whether the person has a propensity to work hared and whether he or she likes classical music. It is obvious that non-welfare information is limitless, even though we can place a higher or perhaps more meaningful value on some characteristics such as income, health status and education. When the Pareto vector is indifferent because one is only including some non-welfarist information, it still may not be enough to accurately say that one outcome is truly better than other.

Howard Chang, in “The Possibility of a Fair Paretian defines welfarism as “restricting the information that can be utilized in ranking social states to utility information responding to those social states”, p. 251. He states that this is the standard definition among social choice theorists. In this paper, he conjectures that social welfare does not depend solely on individual utilities that comply with the Pareto principle. The notion of fairness in with regard to the Pareto principle will always make a distinction between the two outcomes considered in welfarism.

Andrew Moore and Roger Crisp in “Welfarism in Moral Theory” are defending would like to bring clarity to this moral theory so that it may advance. Welfarists claim that morality is a matter of the well- being of individuals or that some well being has moral significance. They believe that many social theorists define welfarism in such broad and robust terms, that it loses its significance. For these authors, there is a suitable broad conception of well-being. There is a distinction between one’s own well being that is conceptually distinct from the good of others. There are equivalents of well-being that include a person’s good, benefit, advantage, interest, prudential value welfare, happiness, flourishing, utility and the like. The authors state that there is a three way division in defining theories of well-being that have become standard.

The first theory is the satisfaction theory, which resembles hedonism, taking pleasure in what you get in life. In satisfaction theories, goods are added up and bads are subtracted. The fulfillment theory, well-being is understood to be getting what you want, prefer, desire or choose. However, what one chooses, prefers desires or chooses is not always bring satisfaction which distinguishes the two theories. Fulfillment theories appeal to the agent’s desires or wants and often restrict to a rational or informed subset of theses states. The third theory is object or ideal where the welfare-maker is ideal and is the perfection of human nature. Objective theorists also maintain that well-being is ideal in the sense that the constituents of well-being that enhance the well-being of anyone who has prudential values. These prudential values are pleasure accomplishment, autonomy, friendship and other related values. These authors argue for the disjunction of these theories for they leave theoretical space for non-welfarist views. Other vehicles of welfare that may matter are acts, practices, institutions, lives, rules, character states, modes of thoughts and similar concepts. They also speak of the concepts of temporal and personal location. The past, present and time have fundamental importance when speaking of welfarism. The question then becomes if welfare is past, present or future and it is yours or mine. There are other welfarist views that attempt to answer these questions such relative ethical egoism or act utilitarianism. They seek to answer the question if any sort of welfarism is defensible in moral theory. An adequate account of welfarism must tell us which individuals are capable of well-being. One must give a detailed theory of well-being. This detailed theory retricts the attention to those who are capable of it.    

In closing this paper, I will discuss briefly the philosophical views of a twentieth century philosopher, Charles Taylor, who speaks of the ordinary life, utilitarianism and welfarism. In, Sources of the Self, he writes about “affirmation of the ordinary life” as the major theme. He asserts that human welfare has some origins in religious sources and as one of the central themes of Christian spirituality. Modern utilitarianism is a secularized variant of it. He argues that Utilitarianism and Deontology are systematized and organize everything around one basic reason, whereas Aristotelian ethics sees us as pursuing a number of goods, i.e., virtues, even though we can speak of a single complete good. He points out that in Utilitarianism that when we give a reason for a certain moral principle, we relate A to B if B brings about a desirable end and we could be morally committed to doing A. He points out an example of paying taxes for the general good. However, if the taxes aren’t being used appropriately, this relationship has failed. When speaking of the good or goods, Taylor makes qualitative distinctions between hyper and higher goods that should have a place in moral life. He does acknowledge that utilitarians do accord rationality and benevolence higher motives, (Taylor, 76-78).

In Chapter 19 of Sources of the Self, Taylor discusses that in the radical Enlightenment, the radical Aufklaer had an ethic based on utility rather than a providential order. Judgments of right and wrong are not based on a providential design e.g., the Laws of nature, right reason or natural justice or equity. It is obvious that Taylor has a problem with the principle of utility where the moral foundation is maximizing happiness. Stating Lockean disengagement, the state of nature is where no one is born good, nor bad according to the mutual interests or opposing interests that unite or divide them, servicing the general happiness. The radical utilitarians rejected the constitutive good of Deism and the providential order, but did accept the life goods that underpinned Deism. These goods are the ideal of self-responsible reason, the ideal of universal and impartial benevolence and the notion that the ordinary fulfillments that we seek, the pursuit of happiness in what we desire is worthy of being pursued. This focus on utility alone promised a single-minded pursuit of happiness, as during this period of history, there was a move from Deism to materialism and from providentialism to utilitarianism. There was a shedding of the vestiges of old spiritual beliefs in God, immortality, providential guidance, the immortality of the soul to the attraction of the pursuit of happiness, benevolence and the image of nature which underlay them.












Bibliography

Blackboy Charles, In Defense of Welfarism, Montreal, Canada, Universite de Montreal,
            2002, 12, February

Chang, Howard, The Possibility of a Fair Paretian, The Yale Law Journal,  Vol. 110, No.
2. (Nov., 2000), pp. 252-258

Crisp, Moore et al., Welfarism in Moral Theory, Australasian Journal of Philosophy,
74; 4, 598-613

Holtug, Nils. Welfarism-The Very Idea, Utiltas Vol. 15, N.2, July 2003, pp. 151-175

Sen, Amartya, Utilitarianism and Welfarism, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 76, No.9.
(Sep., 1979), pp. 463-489













No comments: