IS WELFARE AN INDEPENDENT GOOD?

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talbot Brewer
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
First Person ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Cottage Industry ◽  
Individual Welfare ◽  
Fair Game ◽  
Good For ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Subjective States

AbstractIn recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it.

Materialism and the First Person

2003 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 123-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Madell
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Direct Information ◽  
Know How ◽  
Material State ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Subjective States

Here are some sentences from Fred Dretske's book Naturalising the Mind:For a materialist there are no facts that are accessible to only one person … If the subjective life of another being, what it is like to be that creature, seems inaccessible, this must be because we fail to understand what we are talking about when we talk about its subjective states. If S feels some way, and its feeling some way is a material state, how can it be impossible for us to know how S feels? Though each of us has direct information about our own experiences, there is no privileged access. If you know where to look, you can get the same information I have about the character of my experiences. This is a result of thinking about the mind in naturalistic terms. Subjectivity becomes part of the objective order. For materialists, this is as it should be.

Symposium on Amartya Sen's philosophy: 2 Unstrapping the straitjacket of ‘preference’: a comment on Amartya Sen's contributions to philosophy and economics

2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Welfare Economics ◽  
Individual Behavior ◽  
Microeconomic Theory ◽  
Individual Preferences ◽  
Individual Welfare ◽  
Philosophy And Economics

The concept of preference dominates economic theory today. It performs a triple duty for economists, grounding their theories of individual behavior, welfare, and rationality. Microeconomic theory assumes that individuals act so as to maximize their utility – that is, to maximize the degree to which their preferences are satisfied. Welfare economics defines individual welfare in terms of preference satisfaction or utility, and social welfare as a function of individual preferences. Finally, economists assume that the rational act is the act that maximally satisfies an individual's preferences. The habit of framing problems in terms of the concept of preference is now so entrenched that economists rarely entertain alternatives.

The Misidentification of Immunity to Error through Misidentification

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (12) ◽  
pp. 663-677
Author(s):  
Rachael Wiseman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Special Kind ◽  
First Person ◽  
Personal Memory ◽  
Blue Book ◽  
Self Knowledge

Sidney Shoemaker credits Wittgenstein’s Blue Book with identifying a special kind of immunity to error that is characteristic of ‘I’ in its “use as subject” (Shoemaker 1968). This immunity to error is thought by Shoemaker, and by many following him, to be central to the meaning of ‘I’ and thus to the topics of self-knowledge, self-consciousness and personal memory. This paper argues that Wittgenstein’s work does not contain the thesis, nor any version of the thesis, that there is a use of ‘I’—‘use as subject’—which is ‘immune to error through misidentification’. It offers an interpretative corrective and shows that the passage in question is part of a deep challenge to IEM and to accounts of first-person thought that begin with the idea that there are two uses of the word ‘I’. With the corrective in place novel perspectives on the relation between self-consciousness and subjectivity become visible.

scholarly journals Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience in Organizational Research: Functional and Nonfunctional Approaches

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Bagozzi ◽  
Nick Lee
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Organizational Research ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Viable Approach ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Development Methods

Neuroscience offers a unique opportunity to elucidate the role of mental phenomena, including consciousness. However the place of such phenomena in explanations of human behavior is controversial. For example, consciousness has been construed in varied and conflicting forms, making it difficult to represent it in meaningful ways without committing researchers to one species of consciousness or another, with vastly different implications for hypothesis development, methods of study, and interpretation of findings. We explore the conceptual foundations of different explications of consciousness and consider alternative ways for studying its role in research. In the end, although no approach is flawless or dominates all others in every way, we are convinced that any viable approach must take into account, if not privilege, the self in the sense of representing the subjective, first-person process of self as observer and knower of one’s own actions and history, and the feelings and meanings attached to these. The most promising frameworks in this regard are likely to be some variant of nonreductive monism, or perhaps a kind of naturalistic dualism that remains yet to be developed coherently.

scholarly journals Quantity, quality, equality: introducing a new measure of social welfare

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Enflo
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Strict Monotonicity ◽  
Individual Welfare ◽  
Intuitive Idea

AbstractIn this essay I propose a new measure of social welfare. It captures the intuitive idea that quantity, quality, and equality of individual welfare all matter for social welfare. More precisely, it satisfies six conditions: Equivalence, Dominance, Quality, Strict Monotonicity, Equality and Asymmetry. These state that (i) populations equivalent in individual welfare are equal in social welfare; (ii) a population that dominates another in individual welfare is better; (iii) a population that has a higher average welfare than another population is better, other things being equal; (iv) the addition of a well-faring individual makes a population better, whereas the addition of an ill-faring individual makes a population worse; (v) a population that has a higher degree of equality than another population is better, other things being equal; and (vi) individual illfare matters more for social welfare than individual welfare. By satisfying the six conditions, the measure improves on previously proposed measures, such as the utilitarian Total and Average measures, as well as different kinds of Prioritarian measures.

It’s Good for Me

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Nia Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
Attitude Change ◽  
Health Messages ◽  
First Person ◽  
Societal Values ◽  
Emotional Appeal ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Good For ◽  
Health Intentions

This study examines moral development’s role in judgments of health messages. This research assesses which appeals and type of benefit advertised in health ads impact ad effectiveness and health intentions. Results indicate that messages advertising a third-person benefit of the behavior are more appealing than a first-person benefit and that moral development should be considered when designing health messages. The ads presenting a third-person benefit and an emotional appeal were more effective among those who rated higher in the maintaining norms schema of moral development and among those with higher moral development. This indicates that health messages targeting adolescents should emphasize the principles at play when encouraging behavior or attitude change and should highlight societal values in the behaviors.

scholarly journals Who should take care of the poor? Religion and social welfare in America

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Jelisaveta Vukelic ◽  
Dragan Stanojevic
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare System ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Social Welfare System ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

The purpose of this study is to examine the church-state relations in the United States from the perspective of the social welfare system. More precisely, we are questioning the way the conceptual foundations and practical activities of religious organizations influence the directions of social policy and shape the way of dealing with the poor. The first part of the text outlines the main features of religious life and social welfare system in America, while the second contains an analysis of the impact of basic moral and religious principles of the Reformed Protestantism and Roman Catholicism (the two most widespread religious traditions) and the ways in which religious organizations are taking part in the modern social welfare system in America.

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