Perhaps the most important goal of law and policy is improving people’s lives. But what constitutes improvement? What is quality of life, and how can it be measured? In previous articles, we have used insights from the new field of hedonic psychology to analyze central questions in civil and...

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...

“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,...

"Prioritarianism is a framework for ethical assessment that gives extra weight to the worse off. Unlike utilitarianism, which simply adds up well-being numbers, prioritarianism is sensitive to the distribution of well-being across the population of ethical concern. Prioritarianism in Practice...