Talk:Welfarism

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This may belong on both list of ethics topics and list of economics topics. Would suggest that the author review the following to include how they relate: social welfare function, welfare economics, Amartya Sen, human development, human development theory, human capital.

Bad definition[edit]

It does not explain what is welfarism. It just goes around the subject.

Welfarism is not a form of consequentialism. It is an axiological theory. Roughly speaking, welfarism + consequentialism = utilitarianism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.160.30.91 (talk) 14:26, 25 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Merge with Penal welfarism[edit]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Merge done

The Penal welfarism article does not present sufficient information to stand on its own. It should be merged into this article. Neelix (talk) 15:03, 30 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It should not be merged into the welfarism aticle, it can be one of the welfarsim sections, however penal welfarism deserves to be an article on its own. The simple definition provided is a good one, Garland (2001) provides an additional overview of penal welfarism and changes that took place to bring us to wehre we are now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.195.86.37 (talk) 00:50, 27 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Essetially the same concept. Agree with merge. -- P 1 9 9 • TALK 18:29, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Maintenance tag "unfocused"[edit]

Hello Carchasm, I saw that you added the tag "unfocused" to the article with the explanation all of the "welfarism is about X, but sometime it's about y" either is wrong or this article should be split. I think we can exclude the first option ("either is wrong"): Welfarism is sometimes discussed as a theory of morality in general (Keller 2009). But it is most influential as a theory strictly of value (or the good) simpliciter (Bramble 2021, first page). This leaves the second option: should the article be split? If the two senses were very different (like mouse as an animal vs as an input device), I would agree. However, the two senses here are very similar. Many of the arguments for and against welfarism apply to both and various theorists don't even explicitly distinguish between the two. This problem does not just pertain to welfarism: for many philosophical concepts and theories, different theorists use different definitions that are nonetheless covered by one Wikipedia article. For this reason, I think WP:BROADCONCEPT is more applicable here than WP:CONTENTSPLIT. What are your thoughts, should the article discuss the distinction between the two somehow differently? Any other thoughts on how it may be improved? Phlsph7 (talk) 09:27, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, that makes sense. After re-reading it a few times I agree, it's a more of a broad concept. I think my confusion here was caused by the fact that I had read it in a way that made the normative theory was more segregated from the value theory, but it's really more connected than I first realized.

As far as improvements, I was initially struggling to articulate how I thought this could be made more clear, so I decided to try restructuring the article a bit myself, along the lines of a broad concept article. I've added some more section headers, moved some of the arguments "for" to the relevant sections, while the arguments against are still kept together in a criticism section since a lot of them see like they could be applied to any form of welfarism even if some are directed at specific subtypes. I've also reordered it a bit and changes some wording, but I believe all of the material and topics covered are still there.

What do you think? - car chasm (talk) 22:54, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for putting all the work into this. You are right that the previous version gave too much emphasis to the difference between the forms of welfarism. Having a general definition-section to cover them instead is an elegant solution. The idea of breaking up the arguments section works fine as well. I made a few adjustments. The main one was to have a new section for types of welfarism and to merge the section "Theories of well-being" into the section "Nature of well-being". The idea behind this change is that some issues discussed in the types-section, like the question of whether the distribution of degrees of well-being matters to value, pertain more specifically to welfarism and less to the nature of well-being. The section "Theories of well-being" could be left as a distinct section but I thought it better to merge it into the section "Nature of well-being" since the topics are quite similar and we already have many sections relative to the length of the article. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:29, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]