22 Jan 2019 | 1:00pm - 2:00pm | CRASSH Meeting Room, Alison Richard Building, Cambridge, CB3 9DT |
- Description
- Programme
Description
Wellbeing is a concept that plays a central role in political and moral debates about health, education, and disability for example, as well as in economic debates about resource distribution more generally. But the nature of wellbeing is unclear: is a good life a life in which your preferences are satisfied? or is a good life a life of pleasure? or is it something else? Indeed, irrespective of what you think the nature of wellbeing is, it is also unclear how wellbeing might best be measured. To what extent is a person’s preferences or their self-reports of their lived experience a good guide to their degree of wellbeing? Do preferences need to be “purified” or “laundered” first? What to make of the problem of adaptive preference? When should peoples’ first-hand testimony be taken at face value, and when should it be examined critically?
We will examine these issues by reading some recent debates in economics and philosophy. Our particular emphasis towards the second half of the reading group will be the case of illness and disability.
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This week’s reading:
Erik Angner, ‘What Preferences Really Are,’ Philosophy of Science, 85, 4 (2018): 660-681.
This event is hosted by the ERC-funded project ‘Qualitative and Quantitative Social Science: A Unified Logic of Causal Inference?’. QUALITY is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (ERC grant agreement no. 715530)
Programme
22 January 2019 | What Preferences Really Are. |
29 January 2019 | Theorising Child Wellbeing. |
5 February 2019 | Preference, Evidence and Welfare. |
12 February 2019 | What are Adaptive Preferences? |
19 February 2019 | Preference Purification. |
26 February 2019 | Taking their Word for it: Theories of Disability. |
5 March 2019 | Is Wellbeing Possible in Illness? |
12 March 2019 | Evaluating the Quality of Dying and Death. |