Well-being and Fair Distribution

In Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, author Matthew D. Adler provides readers with a comprehensive philosophically grounded argument for the use of social welfare functions as a framework for governmental policy analysis. Well-Being and Fair Distribution addresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the possibility of an interpersonal...

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In Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, author Matthew D. Adler provides readers with a comprehensive philosophically grounded argument for the use of social welfare functions as a framework for governmental policy analysis. Well-Being and Fair Distribution addresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the possibility of an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being, or "utility" metric; the moral value of equality, and how that bears on the form of the social welfare function; social choice under uncertainty; and the possibility of integrating considerations of individual choice and responsibility into the social-welfare-function framework. Adler's book also deals with issues of implementation, and explores how survey data and other sources of evidence might be used to calibrate both a utility metric and a social welfare function, and whether distributive goals are ever best pursued through regulation rather than the tax system. In working through this range of theoretical and practical issues, Well-Being and Fair Distribution draws from a wide variety of literatures, including philosophical scholarship on equality, responsibility, the nature of well-being, and personal identity over time; the social choice literature within economics; applied economic literatures concerning the measurement of inequality and poverty; legal and policy-analysis scholarship on cost-benefit analysis, environmental justice, and the choice between regulation and taxation; and the burgeoning field of "happiness studies."

Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from welfare economics, normative ethics, and legal theory. Adler’s current research agenda focuses on “priori...

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Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from welfare economics, normative ethics, and legal theory. Adler’s current research agenda focuses on “prioritarianism”—a refinement to utilitarianism that gives extra weight (“priority”) to the worse off. He writes about the theoretical foundations of prioritarianism; its implementation as a policy analysis methodology, in the form of a “social welfare function” or cost-benefit analysis with distributional weights; and its application to a variety of policy domains, including climate change, risk regulation, and health policy.

Adler is the author of numerous articles and several monographs, including New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis (Harvard, 2006; co-authored with Eric Posner); Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, which systematically discusses how to integrate considerations of fair distribution into policy analysis (Oxford, 2012); and Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction (Oxford, 2019), an overview of the social-welfare function approach. With Marc Fleurbaey, he edited the Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy (2016). Along with Ole Norheim, he is the co-founder of the Prioritarianism in Practice Research Network, whose work appears in an edited volume, Prioritarianism in Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Adler was until 2017 an editor of the journal Legal Theory, and is now an editor of Economics and Philosophy.

Prior to joining the Duke Law faculty in 2012, Adler was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Bar-Ilan University, Columbia University, Duke, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia. In addition to his Duke appointment, Adler currently holds a 3-year position as the Ludwig M. Lachmann Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Adler has a B.A. and J.D. from Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal. He also received an M. Litt. in modern history from St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He clerked for Judge Harry Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1991-1992 and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor during the 1992-1993 term. Adler practiced litigation at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania law faculty in 1995.

1. Preliminaries: Morality, Consequentialism, Welfarism
Matthew D. Adler
I. What Is a Moral Decision Procedure?
A. Normative Evaluation, Moral Evaluation, and Persons
B. Morality, Social Norms, and Law
C. Moral Decision Procedures
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1. Preliminaries: Morality, Consequentialism, Welfarism
Matthew D. Adler
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
2. The SWF Approach and Its Competitors
Matthew D. Adler
I. The SWF Approach: An Introduction
A. What Is an SWF?
– The Pigou–Dalton Principle (for Ranking Utility Vectors)
B. The Social Welfare Function in Welfare Economics and Contemporary Policy Analysis
II. 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 Analysis
V. QALY-based Cost-Effectiveness Analysis
3. Well-Being and Interpersonal Comparisons
Matthew D. Adler
I. What is Well-Being? Philosophical Debates
A. Preferences, Mental States, and Objective Goods
B. Why the Debate?
C. Metaethical Disputes
II. Interpersonal Comparisons
A. The Generic Case for Interpersonal Comparisons
B. Harsanyi’s “Extended Preference” Solution
III. Well-Being: An Account
A. Own-History Preferences
B. Extended Preferences (Spectator not Subject)
C. Full Information and Rationality
D. Zeroing Out
E. Pooling Utility Functions
F. Why This Account is Attractive
IV. Lingering Objections
A. Intertemporal and Interworld Change in Preferences
B. Respecting Individual Sovereignty
C. The Limits of EU Theory
D. Should We Use EU Theory to Construct a Difference Ordering?
4. Estimating Utilities
Matthew D. Adler
I. Simplified Outcomes, Missing Attributes, and Extended Preferences
II. Inferring Extended Preferences from Ordinary Preferences
A. The Non-Essentiality Condition
B. 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
5. The Case for a Continuous Prioritarian SWF
Matthew D. Adler
The Pigou–Dalton Principle in Terms of Well-Being
Separability
I. Fairness
A. Fairness and the Separateness of Persons
B. Three Conceptions of Fairness:
– Veil of Ignorance
– Claims within Outcomes
– Claims across Outcomes
C. Is Morality Exhausted by Fairness?
II. The Pigou–Dalton Principle
A. The Utilitarian SWF
B. The Sufficientist SWF
III. Separability
IV. Prioritarianism and Prioritarian SWFs (Continuous and Discontinuous)
– Numbers Win
A. What Is Prioritarianism?
B. The Leximin SWF
– Absolute Priority for the Worse Off
– Conditional Contracting Extremes
– Absolute Priority below the Mean
C. The Prioritarian SWF with a Lexical Threshold
D. “Numbers Win” Redux – Small Losses Trumped
V. The Atkinson SWF
A. Well-Being Ratios
B. The Atkinson SWF and Ratio Rescaling Invariance
– A Leaky Transfer: Definition
– Ratio Rescaling Invariance
C. Calibrating the Atkinson SWF
VI. The Metaethics of the SWF
6. Lifetime Prioritarianism
Matthew D. Adler
I. Personal Identity over Time
II. Lifetime Well-Being
A. The Structure of Lifetime Well-Being
B. Discounting
III. The Basic Case for Lifetime Prioritarianism
IV. Does Parfit’s Reductionist Account of Personal Identity Undermine It?
A. Shifting from Persons to Momentary Time-Slices
B. Shifting from Persons to Person-Stages
C. Reducing the Moral Weight of Fairness
V. Intuitions about Equalization
A. Intrapersonal Equalization
B. Interpersonal Synchronization
C. Interpersonal Equalization
7. Ranking Actions: Prioritarianism under Uncertainty
Matthew D. Adler
I. EU Theory
A. EU Theory as Bridge Principles
B. Meshing EU Theory with the Continuous Prioritarian SWF
– Sure Thing Principle
– Ordinary Stochastic Dominance
– Weak Stochastic Dominance
II. Defending EU Prioritarianism from the Targeted Objection
A. The Targeted Objection: How EU Prioritarianism Violates Ex Ante Pareto and Pigou–Dalton
– Ex Ante Pigou–Dalton Principle
– Ex Ante Pareto-Indifference
– Ex Ante Pareto-Superiority
B. Responding to the Targeted Objection
C. Choosing a “Translation” Function (Ex Ante Separability)
D. Should We Reconsider the Continuous Prioritarian SWF?
III. Generic Refinements to EU Theory
A. Incomplete Orderings (and Dynamic Choice)
B. Imprecise Probabilities
C. Uncertainty about the Ordering of Outcomes
D. Strategic Interaction
8. Next Steps
Matthew D. Adler
I. Law and Legally Optimal Structures
A. Is it Optimal for Non-tax Bodies to use CBA?
B. Does Everyone Benefit in the Long Run if Government uses CBA?
C. Abilities and Motivations of Government Officials (Regulatory Review)
II. Relaxing the Population Assumption
A. Non-identity Problems
B. Variable Population Size
C. Infinite Populations
III. Responsibility
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