Theories of well-being and well-being policy: a view from methodology

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.