Review of Matthew Adler ’ s Well - being and fair distribution : beyond cost - benefit analysis . Oxford : Oxford University

Matthew Adler develops and defends a particular view on how the appraisal of social policies should be performed and in doing so offers a new and refreshing take on the subject of fair distribution. Adler argues for prioritarianism, which, broadly speaking, acknowledges that inequality in the distribution of well being across individuals constitutes an important factor in collective decisionmaking. Adler does not contribute a novel prioritarian social welfare function. He provides a more thorough justification for one among those the literature has already identified (see Moulin 1988). In pursuit of this agenda, Adler takes us through all the stages of the construction of his prioritarian argument, from the foundational underpinnings to its policy implications. With this book, Adler accomplishes the daunting task of merging both the philosopher’s and the economist’s perspectives on the issues at hand. His exposition, as well as his line of reasoning, is enhanced by the fact that each topic is addressed from multiple angles. The argument of the book develops against the backdrop of the fundamental exercise that underlies welfare analysis. Let N = {1, 2, ..., n} denote the set of individuals and X = {x, y, ..., z} denote the set of outcomes. Moreover, for each individual i ∈N, let ui: X →R be an index of individual well being at each outcome x ∈X. Adopting this premise, one is confronted with the question of what constitutes the appropriate criterion for ranking outcomes from a collective point of view. The book puts forward a particular prioritarian view on the matter of how a measure of social welfare should be constructed. A prioritarian social choice function bears the following form. Let g: R →R be a nondecreasing and concave function. For each pair of outcomes x, y ∈X, x is socially at least as good as y if and only if