ABSTRACT
This chapter will introduce welfare economics, look at its normative foundation and discuss alternative proposals for one of its core ideas: its conception of well-being. (This is a philosophers' term. Economists usually refer to the same thing as “welfare.” “Welfare,” however, also means “social support,” so I will use the philosophers' term in what follows.) Theories of well-being are highly controversial. That this should be so is not hard to see. Well-being measures, roughly speaking, how well a life is going for the person leading it. That different people, coming from different social and cultural backgrounds, should have different ideas of what that means is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that philosophers, who value abstract and universal theories, do not easily find a fully adequate theory.
