The End of Welfare As We Know It?

A notable achievement of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other is its sustained critique of welfarist consequentialism. Consequentialism is the doctrine that one morally ought always to do an act, among the alter natives, that brings about a state of affairs that is no less good than any other one could bring about. Welfarism is the view that what makes a state of affairs better or worse is some increasing function of the welfare for persons realized in it. I shall argue that Scanlon's critique, though con taining much of interest, fails on its own terms. Scanlon's book addresses fundamental issues of moral theory, and his discussions of welfarism and consequentialism are intricately woven into his treatments of these issues. On several of these large topics his insights are profound, so the reader might easily gain the impression that a strong momentum of argument against welfarist consequentialism is developing. Assessing the argument at each of its nested stages corrects this mistaken impression. Scanlon's arguments are indeed insightful but not in ways that should budge the consequentialist from her position.