ABSTRACT

In the recent well-being literature, various theory-free accounts of well-being have been proposed to ground informative evaluations of policies’ welfare implications without relying on any specific theories of well-being. In this paper, I provide a methodological assessment of theory-free accounts and argue that, despite these accounts, grounding informative evaluations of policies’ welfare implications frequently requires policy makers to rely on specific theories of well-being. Policy makers should ground their evaluations of policies’ welfare implications on explicit specifications of what theories of well-being they rely on and should openly acknowledge the theory-dependent character of their evaluations rather than aiming to provide theory-free welfare evaluations.

摘要

在最近的福利文献中，已经提出了各种关于福利的无理论的解释，以便在不依赖任何特定福利理论的情况下，对政策的福利含义进行有益的评估。在本文中，我提供了一种对无理论账户的方法学评估，并指出，尽管有这些账户，但对政策的福利含义进行有益的评估往往需要政策制定者依赖于特定的福利理论。政策制定者应基于对福利理论所依据的明确规定，来对政策的福利影响进行评估，并应公开承认其评估的理论依赖性，而不是旨在提供无理论的福利评估。