What is welfare and can we measure it?

In recent years, the enhancement of human welfare, well-being or happiness
have become focal concern in public discourse, among professional bodies and
government think tanks, policy makers and philosophers, at national,
European and global levels. The question of how to conceptualise, assess and
measure welfare is crucial to ethical debates over social justice. Welfare
is also a key concept in many academic disciplines, including philosophy,
psychology, economics and highly relevant for the law as well.

Emergent issues about welfare that need further discussion include:

• How is welfare related to wealth, interests, capabilities or happiness?
• Welfare as source of moral rights and duties
• Welfare in relation to distributive justice
• Welfare as a fundamental concept in economics
• How can theoretical debates about welfare impact on policy and practice?
• Is there any way of measuring or estimating welfare that is both theoretically sound and practically useful?

This workshop will be an occasion for in-depth discussion of a relatively small numbers of papers (about ten) which will be circulated to participants in advance.

For any question about the workshop, please contact Peter Cserne ([email protected]).