Abstract Summary
Daniel Hausman (University of Wisconsin-Madison) - Well-being or welfare (which I take to be synonymous) play important roles in economics, psychology, and philosophy. Normative economists have linked welfare to command over consumption goods. Psychologists have been concerned with the sources of positive and negative affect. Philosophers have been concerned with what constitutes a good life. Economists have taken welfare to be indicated by – if not constituted by – preference satisfaction. Psychologists have regarded welfare as a matter of feelings. Philosophers have been ambivalent and conflicted, and they have often been skeptical of the views of economists and psychologists. If one identifies welfare with preference satisfaction, then its measurement is a matter of measuring preferences, which is in principle a task for a positive science. Similarly, if one identifies welfare with sets of feelings, those feelings can be studied by a positive science. Once one has accepted an evaluative thesis specifying what well-being is, then there seems to be no difficulty in principle in measuring well-being or studying its causes and effects. Of course, if one accepts some version of the open question argument, it is impossible to identify welfare with any non-evaluative state of affairs, be it preference satisfaction, feelings, or whatever; and even if one does not accept any version of the open question argument, the theories of well-being that are implicit in psychology and welfare economics are deeply flawed; and few firm conclusions can be drawn concerning welfare from measuring preferences or affect. On the other hand, it would be absurd to deny that economists and psychologists can learn anything about what promotes individual and social welfare from studying what satisfies preferences or causes certain affect. If neither preference satisfaction nor mental states constitute well-being, how can investigations of what satisfies preferences and what causes certain affects contribute to our understanding of what makes for a good life? The solution to this puzzle requires an account of how it is possible to understand what welfare is and to measure it, without possessing any acceptable philosophical theory of welfare. The solution lies in what I call “folk theories” of welfare. These consist of platitudes such as “people are generally better off if they are healthy” that are contentful and useful, although far from universal truths. Implicit acceptance of folk theories enables economists to make claims linking welfare to preference satisfaction, without taking preference satisfaction to constitute welfare, and it enables psychologists to make claims linking welfare to certain affective states, without taking those states to constitute welfare. The vagueness and ellipses in folk theories have their costs, however, and economic and psychological studies of welfare are inevitably tentative and contestable.
