L. W. Sumner’s excellent book “Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics” has four central goals. He aims to (1) demonstrate the subjectivity of welfare, (2) show that the traditional subjective accounts of welfare, namely hedonism and desire theories, are inadequate, (3) construct an alternative subjectivist account of welfare, and (4) argue for the moral primacy of welfare. I discuss the second and fourth goals of the book.
