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...

Standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is insensitive to distributional concerns. A policy that improves the lives of the rich, and makes the poor yet worse off, will be approved by CBA as long as the policy’s aggregate monetized benefits are positive. Distributional weights offer an apparent...

“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,...

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is notoriously insensitive to distributional concerns, favoring a policy with a positive sum of monetary equivalents, even if better-off individuals are benefitted at the expense of worse-off ones. This problem is sometimes mitigated, in practice, by monetizing goods...

"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...