The Download of the Week is Welfare as Happiness by John Bronsteen , Christopher J. Buccafusco and Jonathan S. Masur. Here is the abstract:
In the fields of law, economics, and philosophy, the leading conception
of human welfare is preference-satisfaction – getting what one wants.
An important rival is an objective list approach to ethics – possessing
an enumerated set of capabilities. This Article argues against both
major views and in favor of a third, defining welfare as subjective
well-being – feeling good. We reject the leading approach on the ground
that preferences are often mistaken or else involve goals independent
of the individual's own welfare. When sophisticated
preference-satisfaction theories launder out such preferences, those
accounts reduce to our happiness-based approach. We reject objective
list theories on the ground that they impose objective criteria,
whereas an individual's well-being is a purely subjective concept. How
good a person's life is for her cannot be judged by how well she
satisfies someone else's standards of virtue or flourishing. By
contrast with these theories, our hedonic approach captures the
ordinary understanding of what it means for someone to have well-being,
and it stands up better to analytical challenges than do its rivals. As
a result, we advocate that administrative agencies replace cost-benefit
analysis (the tool of the preference-based approach) with well-being
analysis. Groundbreaking new research in hedonic psychology makes this
possible, and we discuss how it can be accomplished.
And from the paper:
The problem with [Sen's objective] view [of well being] is that well-being is inherently
subjective, not objective. The miserable person who uses her
capabilities cannot reasonably be deemed better off than the happy
person who does not. It is not clear what the metaphysical basis for
Sen‟s alternative objective judgment would be; and if the judgment
relies upon intuition, it comes up short by that yardstick when pitted
against our happiness-based conception of welfare. It grates strongly
against standard intuitions to say that a person who constantly feels
awful possesses great well-being because she happens to be engaged
in activities that appear on a list made by others.
Highly recommended.