Preliminaries: morality, consequentialism, welfarism -- The SWF approach and its competitors -- Well-being and interpersonal comparisons -- Estimating utilities -- The case for a continuous prioritarian SWF -- Lifetime prioritarianism -- Ranking actions: prioritarianism under uncertainty -- Next...

Well-Being and Fair Distribution provides a rigorous and comprehensive defense of the “social welfare function” as a tool for evaluating governmental policies. In particular, it argues for a “prioritarian” social welfare function: one that gives greater weight to well-being changes...

We introduce a new "different lives" survey format, which asks respondents to rank hypothetical lives described in terms of longevity, health, happiness, income, and other elements of the quality of life. In this short paper, we show that the format is of policy relevance whether a mental state,...

What are the methodologies for assessing and improving governmental policy in light of well-being? The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of this topic. The contributors draw from welfare economics, moral philosophy, and...

“Prioritarianism” is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. Prioritarianism has been much discussed in the philosophical literature over the last thirty years, where it has emerged as an important competitor to utilitarianism. Like utilitarianism,...