A cause of preference is not an object of preference

An important objection to preference-satisfaction theories of well-being is that these theories cannot make sense of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. A tradition dating back to Harsanyi (1953) attempts to respond to this objection by appeal to so-called extended preferences: very roughly, preferences over situations whose description includes agents' preferences. This paper examines the prospects for defending the preference-satisfaction theory via this extended preferences program. We argue that making conceptual sense of extended preferences is less problematic than others have supposed, but that even so extended preferences do not provide a promising way for the preference satisfaction theo-rist to make interpersonal well-being comparisons. Our main objection takes the form of a trilemma: depending on how the theory based on extended preferences is developed, either (a) the result will be inconsistent with ordinary preference-satisfaction theory, or (b) it will fail to recover sufficiently rich interpersonal well-being comparisons, or (c) it will take on a number of other arguably odd and undesirable commitments.

Social Choice and Welfare, 2003

Welfare economics is incomplete as it analyzes preference without going on to analyze welfare (or happiness) which is the ultimate objective. Preference and welfare may di¤er due to imperfect knowledge, imperfect rationality, and/or a concern for the welfare of others (non-a¤ective altruism). Imperfection in knowledge and rationality has a biological basis and the resulting accumulation instinct amplifies with advertising-fostered consumerism to result in a systematic materialistic bias, as supported by recent evidence on happiness and quality of life. Such a bias, in combination with relativeincome e¤ects, environmental disruption e¤ects, and over-estimation of the excess burden of taxation, results in the over-spending on private consumption and under-provision of public goods, and may make economic growth welfare-reducing. A cost-benefit analysis aiming even just at preference maximization should o¤set the excess burden of financing for public projects by the indirect e¤ect through the relative-income e¤ect and by the environmental disruption e¤ect. A cost-benefit analysis aiming at welfare maximization should, in addition, adjust the marginal consumption benefits of public projects upward by a proportion determined by the proportionate excess of marginal utility over marginal welfare of consumption. The environmental disruption e¤ects have also to be similarly adjusted upward. However, the productive contributions of public projects should not be so adjusted.

Welfare Economics, 2004

Welfare economics has achieved much, although it still has long-standing weaknesses, such as the inability to make non-Pareto comparisons due to the difficulty of making interpersonal comparisons of cardinal utilities. Ways of overcoming this weakness have been discussed in Chapter 5 and in Ng (1996a, 2000a), but the use of interpersonally comparable cardinal utilities has not been widely accepted by economists. In this chapter it is argued that welfare economics is too narrow in focus and should be expanded to make the analysis more complete, and hence more useful. Important reformulations of welfare economics and cost—benefit analysis are needed. Some of the points discussed below have long been known about but have largely been ignored in welfare economic analysis. Some are less well known or are controversial, but are nevertheless important for welfare.

Royal Institute of Philosophy: Supplement, 2006

In this paper, I will argue that the fact that people care about which preferences they have, and the fact that people can change their preferences about which preferences it is good for them to have, together undermine the case for accepting a preference satisfaction conception of welfare.

Subjectivist theories of well-being are attractive: they are both in line with intuitions and accommodate widely held philosophical scepticism about objective prudential value. In this essay I will answer the question whether there is a thoroughly subjectivist theory of well-being that is plausible and coherent. I will first argue that a preference-satisfaction account of well-being is the only convincing way to spell out such a subjectivist theory. Then I will turn to the central question of the evaluation of whole lives in terms of their well-being. A theory that combines idealised instrumental and actual intrinsic preferences will prove useful to explain how overall well-being can be understood as an aggregate of well-being at different times without disregarding overarching structural features of a life. This theory can give an account of issues such as why plans of life usually improve a person's well-being, why premature death is very bad for most people and why a bad end ...

Economica, 2015

In this paper, we study interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing. We show that using subjective wellbeing (SWB) levels can be in conflict with individuals' judgments about their own lives. We propose therefore an alternative wellbeing measure in terms of equivalent incomes that respects individual preferences. We show how SWB surveys can be used to derive the ordinal information about preferences needed to calculate equivalent incomes. We illustrate our approach with Russian panel data (RLMS‐HSE) for the period 1995–2003 and compare it to standard wellbeing measures such as expenditures and SWB. We find that different groups are identified as worst off. For nothing is more certain, than that despair has almost the same effect on us with enjoyment, and that we are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of satisfying any desire, than the desire itself vanishes. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

2003

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is threefold: 1. To present a formal framework for the analysis of paternalism, freedom and well-being. 2. To use this framework in a discussion of endogenous preference adjustments such as the problem of cheap and expensive tastes. 3. To explore under what circumstances it is defendable to use utility of money as an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being.

Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics

This paper provides a real-world test case for how to approach contemporary preference aggregation procedures. We examine the method of using stated preferences (SP) to structure social well-being indices. The method has seen increasing popularity and interest, both in economists’ laboratory research and by governments and international institutions. SP offers a sophisticated aggregation of peoples’ preferences regarding social well-being aspects and, in this way, provides elegant and non-paternalistic techniques for deciding how to weigh and prioritize various potential aspects of social well-being (health, happiness, economic growth, etc.). However, this method also poses difficulties and limitations from broader political and philosophical perspectives. This paper comprehensively charts these difficulties and suggests that SP methods should be complemented with appropriate deliberation procedures. The paper bridges the distinct perspectives of economists and political theorists i...

The aim of the article is to reconstruct the way the concept of well-being is most commonly understood in economics, to identify deficiencies of this understanding , and to find a remedy to them. The paper defends two basic claims: (1) that the dominant understanding of well-being in economics is non-normative and boils down to the concept to utility maximisation, i.e., satisfaction of one's preferences, whatever they are (subject, at best, to some formal constraints); (2) and that, given the shortcomings of the non-normative concept of well-being, e.g., its tautological character (at least in the case of certain formulations of this concept), it is indispensable to build an axiologically richer (that is: normative) concept of well-being, thereby going beyond the mere notion of utility-maximisation. As for the claim (2), two versions of the normative concept are distinguished in the article, viz. an exclusive one (well-being as causally dependent on prudential values but not moral ones) and an inclusive one (well-being as causally dependent on prudential values constrained in some way by moral ones), and it is argued that the latter is more plausible , since, in contrast to the former, it does not rely on a dubious assumption about the absolute priority of prudence over morality.

Journal of Economic Methodology, 2017

Positive economic models aim to provide truthful explanations of significant (aspects of) economic phenomena. While the notion of 'preferences' figures prominently in micro-economic models, it suffers from a remarkable lack of conceptual clarity and rigor. After distinguishing narrow homo economicus models (self-interest maximization) from broader ones (preference satisfaction) and rehearsing the criticisms both have met, I go into the most promising attempt to date at addressing them, developed by Hausman. However, his definition of preferences as 'total comparative evaluations', I argue, plays into the general disregard that economists have for human psychology. My alternative definition of preferences as 'overall comparative evaluations'and hence as one of the many factors that influence people's behaviorallows for more adequate causal explanations of people's dutiful, committed, and norm-guided actions. Against Hausman but in agreement with Sen, it also allows for (motivated) counterpreferential choice.