Pietro Cibinel

Many people accept pluralism about welfare or well-being: there is more than one thing that is finally good for us. Philosophers have discussed extensively the question of how welfare should be distributed, whether across people or states of nature. But how should we distribute individual welfare goods across these dimensions? I argue that certain principles connecting the distribution of welfare to the distribution of welfare goods fail, and explore the connection between these principles and the project of devising an appropriate quantitative measure of welfare. As it turns out, the failure of these principles corresponds to a conflict between different approaches to constructing a quantitative measure of welfare. I identify one such approach, based on tradeoffs across welfare goods, as superior to its alternatives, which are based on tradeoffs across people and states of nature respectively. I explain how this conclusion provides a measurement-theoretic argument for prioritarianism over utilitarianism, and for risk-sensitivity in welfare over risk-neutrality.

This paper develops and defends a non-utilitarian interpretation of John Harsanyi’s social aggregation theorem and sum of vNM utilities approach. On this interpretation, vNM utilities transform an independently available cardinal measure of fully comparable individual well-being. The resulting proposal for ranking well-being distributions—the Risk-Priority View— is not welfare-anonymous and can favor a smaller increase in well-being for one individual rather than a larger increase in well-being for another, equally well-off individual. I argue here that such counterintuitive implications can be defended, and that impartiality can still be secured through the imposition of an alternative, interprofile anonymity axiom.

This paper studies the relationship between promoting people's welfare and respecting their autonomy of choice under risk. I highlight a conflict between these two aims. Given compelling assumptions, welfarists end up disregarding people's unanimous preference, even when everyone involved is entirely rational and only concerned with maximizing their own welfare. Non‐welfarist theories of social choice are then considered. They are shown to face difficulties, too: either they fail to respect the value of welfare in at least one important sense, or they end up prioritizing different people's welfare differently in non‐risky choices, on the basis of their attitudes to risk, which are intuitively irrelevant in this context.