ABSTRACT
Turning first to ‘welfare’ we may first notice that the word is sometimes qualified with the adjective ‘material’, the contrast apparently being ‘spiritual’ or ‘moral’.1 The point of ‘welfare’ is much the same in the three contexts, namely, health and the conditions making for health.2 Confining ourselves to ‘material welfare’ we can suggest that a local authority concerned with the welfare of certain old people or children would have a finite list of things to look at which would not include an investigation of the actual wants of the old people or children. It would see whether they had the food, shelter, clothing and medical attention necessary to maintain a state of health. It makes perfectly good sense to say that a person’s welfare has gone up though his overall ability to satisfy wants (e.g. his income) has gone down or that his welfare has increased but his happiness (pleasure in life) decreased. It also makes sense to say that a person or a whole community place a comparatively low value on welfare as against, say, the maintenance of religious practices.
