Abstract

Something enhances an individual's welfare if it makes her better off, or serves her best interests. The dissertation is an investigation into the nature of welfare, and the role that the notion of welfare should play in moral and political theory. Much discussion of these questions, I suggest, is predicated on some unhelpful assumptions about what welfare is, along with an impoverished conception of the sort of philosophical work that it can do. The main goal of the dissertation is to show that welfarism , according to which considerations of welfare have some sort of unrivalled place in ethical theory, is far more promising than is commonly believed. ;In the first two chapters, I develop a theory of welfare and criticize some of its rivals. I distinguish well-being---a measure of how things are going for an individual at a time---from success---a measure of how things go for an individual over an extended period---and suggest that these are mutually incommensurable aspects of individual welfare, each of which is susceptible to a subjectivist theoretical treatment. The third chapter offers a formulation and sympathetic discussion of welfarism; I claim, among other things, that the welfarist need not be a utilitarian or consequentialist. ;The second half of the dissertation is concerned with welfarist accounts of distributive justice and political freedom. In Chapter Four I argue that the well-known problem of expensive tastes does not offer a good reason to abandon welfarist theories of distributive justice, and in Chapter Five I outline a broad strategy for articulating and defending a kind of welfarist egalitarianism. In the sixth and final chapter I discuss some puzzles about the role that the notion of freedom is granted in political debate, and argue that the value of freedom, properly understood, is not in conflict with the value of welfare