Social Welfare, Priority to the Worst-Off And the Dimensions of Individual Well-Being

When well-being is one-dimensional, the key ethical issue for the definition of social welfare is the degree of inequality aversion, which can be discussed with variants of the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle. When it is measured in terms of primary goods, functionings or capabilities, individual well-being is fundamentally multi-dimensional. It is then important to take account of individual preferences over the different dimensions. This has interesting consequences for the definition of social welfare. This chapter shows how the axiomatic techniques of social choice can then be used to justify particular social welfare functions and derive suitable criteria for the assessment of reforms of the Welfare State and consequences of globalization.