Well-being and fair distribution : beyond cost-benefit analysis /
A comprehensive philosophically grounded argument for the use of social welfare functions as a framework for governmental policy analysis.
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York ; Oxford :
Oxford University Press,
2011.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
Table of Contents:
- Cover; Contents; Introduction; Chapter 1. Preliminaries: Morality, Consequentialism, Welfarism; I. What Is a Moral Decision Procedure?; A. Normative Evaluation, Moral Evaluation, and Persons; B. Morality, Social Norms, and Law; C. Moral Decision Procedures; II. Moral Facts and Moral Epistemology; A. Metaethics; B. Moral Epistemology; III. Consequentialism; A. Agent-Relative Constraints; B. Agent-Relative Options; IV. Welfarism; V. Welfarism: A Formal Characterization; Chapter 2. The SWF Approach and Its Competitors; I. The SWF Approach: An Introduction; A. What Is an SWF?
- B. The Social Welfare Function in Welfare Economics and Contemporary Policy AnalysisII. Cost-Benefit Analysis; A. Minimal Welfarist Criteria; B. Using CBA to Rank Outcomes: The Kaldor-Hicks Defense; C. CBA, Overall Well-Being, and the Ranking of Outcomes; D. Other Roles for CBA?; III. Inequality Metrics; A. Applying Inequality Metrics to the Distribution of Utility; B. Income Evaluation Functions and Equivalent Incomes; C. Applying the Pigou-Dalton Principle to Attributes; D. Egalitarian Equivalence; IV. Other Equity Metrics; A. Poverty Metrics; B. Social-Gradient Metrics.
- C. Tax Incidence AnalysisV. QALY-Based Cost-Effectiveness Analysis; Chapter 3. Well-Being and Interpersonal Comparisons; I. What Is Well-Being? Philosophical Debates; A. Preferences, Mental States, and Objective Goods: Three Themes in the Philosophical Literature on Well-Being; B. Why the Debate?; C. Metaethical Disputes; II. Interpersonal Comparisons; A. The Generic Case for Interpersonal Comparisons; B. Harsanyi's "Extended Preference" Solution to the Puzzle of Interpersonal Comparisons; III. Well-Being: An Account; A. Own-History Preferences.
- B. Extended Preferences for Life-Histories in which the Spectator is not the SubjectC. Full Information and Rationality; D. Zeroing Out; E. Pooling Utility Functions; F. Why Is this an Attractive Account of Well-Being?; IV. Lingering Objections; A. Intertemporal and Interworld Change in Preferences; B. Respecting Individual Sovereignty; C. The Limits of EU Theory (Herein of Incompleteness); D. Should We Use EU Theory to Construct a Difference Ordering?; Chapter 4. Estimating Utilities; I. Simplified Outcomes, Missing Attributes, and Extended Preferences.
- II. Inferring Extended Preferences from Ordinary PreferencesA. The Non-Essentiality Condition; B. What Is the Role of Life-History Surveys?; III. Inferring Extended Preferences: Further Notes and Caveats; A. Subjects' Preferences; B. Heterogeneity in Extended Preferences; C. Temporal Additivity; D. Happiness Data; E. Surveys or Revealed-Preference Data?; IV. Zeroing Out; Chapter 5. The Case for a Continuous Prioritarian SWF; I. Fairness; A. Fairness and the Separateness of Persons; B. Three Conceptions of Fairness: Veil of Ignorance, Claims within Outcomes, Claims across Outcomes.