Matthew D. Adler: Well-being and fair distribution: beyond cost-benefit analysis

In this extraordinarily thorough and thoughtful work, Matthew Adler proves himself a grandmaster of the moral evaluation of public policy. The core idea of the book is that large-scale public policies should be designed to maximize the expectation of a continuous prioritarian social welfare function (SWF). In other words, they should maximize the expectation of the sum-total of transformed individual utilities,where the transformation gives greater weight to increases in utility the worse off an individual is in absolute terms. [Formally, a continuous prioritarian SWF holds that outcome x is at least as good as outcome y iff, for every utility function u(.) in the set of utility functions U that represent individual well-being, ∑N i=1 g(ui (x)) ≥ ∑N i=1 g(ui (y)), where g(.) is a strictly increasing and strictly concave function. If m(x) is a moral value function that evaluates outcomes in this manner, then, on Adler’s view, public policy a is at least as good as policy b iff, for a given outcome set O and a probability function πa (.) linking any given policy a with any outcome, ∑ x∈Oπa (x)m(x) ≥ ∑ x∈Oπb (x)m(x).] The heart of this proposal is simple and close to ideas proposed by others, most notably Parfit (In: Clayton M, Williams A (eds) The ideal of equality, 2002; Utilitas 24:399–440, 2012). The genius of this work lies in the painstaking and creative way it is justified and operationalized. In what follows, I shall summarize the book and critically analyze a few key arguments.