Abstract

Welfare is the measure of how well someone’s life is going for them (either at one time or over a whole life). This concept is crucial throughout practical philosophy, appearing in debates in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and beyond. Philosophical discussions of welfare have centered around the extent to which welfare is purely a matter of the quality of one’s experience, the extent to which it is a matter of getting what one desires or, instead, acquiring some fixed set of desire-independent goods and the extent to which it is related to one’s nature. Another set of debates concerns possible theories of welfare, questions about how many theories of welfare are needed to account for all of the facts about welfare, and whether discourse about welfare is linguistically or conceptually pluralistic in a deep and significant way.