Editorial

Citation

Cserne, P. (2015), "Editorial", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 42 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSE-02-2015-0036

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Social Economics, Volume 42, Issue 5.

Welfare, well-being and happiness have been among the key concepts and key concerns of social, political and legal thought for many centuries. In recent years, the measurement and enhancement of human welfare has become a focal concern in public discourse, among professional bodies and government think tanks, policy makers and public intellectuals. Emergent issues in this discourse include:

• How welfare is related to wealth, interests, capabilities or happiness?

• How can theoretical debates about welfare impact on policy and practice?

• Should governments be concerned with philosophical conceptions of and empirical data about welfare?

• Are there ways of measuring or estimating welfare that are both theoretically sound and practically useful?

• Is welfare a source of moral and legal rights and duties?

• Is welfare still a fundamental concept and proper concern in economics?

Academic specialisation has brought about a diversity of discourses on these issues, often relatively isolated within departments of philosophy, economics, psychology, political science, social policy or law. Yet, the questions how to conceptualise, assess and measure welfare keep transcending disciplinary boundaries and remain crucial in debates over public policy and social justice at national, regional and global levels.

On 28 and 29 November 2013, the Institute of Applied Ethics at the University of Hull, in cooperation with MetaLawEcon, an international academic network of scholars interested in the theoretical foundations of law and economics, convened an interdisciplinary workshop on the conception and measurement of welfare. Hosted by the university’s Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, the workshop was an occasion for in-depth discussion among philosophers, economists, legal scholars and sociologists from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, USA and Canada.

My thanks go to the speakers at the workshop for their thoughtful and thought-provoking papers, and all participants for the lively, enlightening and intense discussion. I am especially grateful to Professor James Connelly and Dr Tony Ward, director and programme director, respectively, of the Institute of Applied Ethics for their openness and support to the idea of the workshop and their generosity with time and ideas throughout the various stages of organisation and publication.

The following selection includes the revised version of three papers presented at the workshop. Each of the three papers provides new insights and by usefully complementing one another they promise an interesting joint contribution to the ongoing interdisciplinary discussion on the nature and measurement of welfare.

Verena Risse’s paper, entitled “Welfare as political morality: right-based, duty-based or goal-based?” starts with an overview of various new indicators which reflect a broadening notion of welfare, going beyond economic welfare, traditionally measured by GDP. Risse discusses whether and under what circumstances these new conceptions of welfare can serve as political morality. Distinguishing goal-based, duty-based and right-based political moralities, she analyses which aspects of welfare are suitably conceptualised, promoted or protected by which of these three political moralities. In particular, she argues that the goal-based approach is most helpful when it comes to promoting inherently collective values, contributing to which can be properly framed as moral or legal duty. But she claims that when social goals are more holistic and diversified, strong subjective rights are required, not for the promotion of mere particular interests but as a counterweight to the promotion of collective goals.

The proper relation of individual welfare and public policy objectives is also an explicit concern in the second paper, entitled “Economic welfare as ethical concept and economic policy”. Taking the Hegelian idea of the just economy as a philosophical starting point, David Merrill suggests that welfare is a normative concept in two senses. First, because it is “a mode of being free for the individual”. Second, by being one of the constituent elements in the philosophy of freedom and right, welfare is also a standard that guides the interventions of public welfare administration. Merrill also argues that Hegel’s philosophy of right is congruent with the type of policy recommendations proposed by post-Keynesian, in particular Minskian economics, and thus provides an ethics capable of addressing important economic problems of our age.

While Merrill’s ambitious discussion illustrates how current policy issues can be illuminated by combining political philosophy and economic theory, the third paper by Manfred Holler, “Welfare, preferences and the reconstruction of desires”, suggests developing the conceptual tools of economic theory in response to theoretical difficulties with specifying welfare as preference satisfaction. Holler explores how desires, rather than preferences can serve as a conceptual tool in formal economic models concerned with individual welfare and its social aggregation. In particular, he analyses how desires can be related to welfare, making use of results of social choice theory. In special cases, desires are well ordered and can be represented by preference orderings, ready for deriving “rational choices”. But when desires are circular, the satisfaction of a particular desire will never trigger happiness because there is always a “higher valued” or “more prominent” desire unsatisfied. In these cases, desires and welfare cannot be matched.

Péter Cserne