Welfare as a Terminal Value

A terminal value is something you want for its own sake—not as a means to something else, but as an end in itself. An instrumental value, by contrast, is something you want because it gets you closer to a terminal value.1

Money is a classic instrumental value. Almost no one wants money for its own sake. They want what money buys, or the security and options it provides. Trace that chain far enough—security, options, comfort, freedom from worry—and you eventually hit something you want simply because you want it, with no further “why” attached. That’s a terminal value.

Most of what we pursue day to day is instrumental. Going to the gym, studying for an exam, networking at a conference—these are means. The chain of “why” has to bottom out somewhere, or our reasons for acting would regress forever. Terminal values are the bottom.

People often treat instrumental values as if they were terminal. They chase money, status, or productivity without really thinking about why they’re doing that. This makes their lives worse than they could be in several ways.

First, it produces bad tradeoffs. If you haven’t reflected on the fact that, say, close relationships and a sense of purpose are terminally valuable for you, you might let your marriage atrophy and neglect your church community to spend more hours working toward a promotion at a company whose mission doesn’t inspire you and where there’s no real prospect of connecting with your coworkers.

Second, it makes priorities incoherent. Two instrumental values can conflict with no principled way to resolve the conflict unless you trace both back to what they’re actually for. You get into Harvard Medical School and your local state medical school. Do you choose prestige over saving money? If the true reason you’re pursuing medicine was to take over your mother’s family practice, the prestige counts for little on its own, unless your reason for that was to raise your family’s status in the community. And what was the deeper reason for that? Cashing out decisions in terminal values gives you a common currency to weigh competing options.

Third, it doesn’t tell you when to stop. Instrumental goals are open-ended; you can always acquire more money or status. Terminal values, once identified, tell you what “enough” looks like. FIRE practitioners (often) have admirable clarity about this: they want to maximize the amount of time they have to pursue specific hobbies, so they determine the amount of money they need to save to sustain those hobbies indefinitely, and retire once they’ve hit that number, even if most people would keep chasing raises and promotions.

While these examples concern individual decision-making, institutions, policies, and even AI systems all have some terminal value implied by what they do in practice. Lacking clarity about terminal values causes the same problems for abstract entities. A company that treats quarterly profit as terminal, rather than instrumental to something like long-term value creation, will make different (and often worse) decisions than one that keeps the real target in view.

Welfare refers to how well or badly a life is going for the individual living it, all things considered. It includes their wellbeing, flourishing, or sense of meaning, considered from the inside.

Philosophers disagree about what counts as welfare, i.e., what counts as evidence for a life going well. Some theories of welfare include:

• Hedonism: welfare is the balance of pleasure over pain—positive versus negative conscious experience.

• Desire/preference satisfaction theories: welfare consists in getting what you want or in your preferences being satisfied, whether or not that feels good in the moment.

• Objective list theories: welfare consists in possessing certain goods—knowledge, friendship, achievement, autonomy—regardless of whether you desire them or they produce pleasure.

Again, the unifying principle is about how things are going for someone, evaluated from their own perspective, not external outcomes. A wealthy person with no friends and constant anxiety is doing well by external metrics, but their welfare is low. A poor person with deep relationships and peace of mind isn’t crushing it on paper, but their welfare is high.

It’s hard for me to think of welfare—defined in this broad way—as anything but a terminal value, especially for individuals. Welfare itself doesn’t obviously reduce to anything deeper. Asking “why do you want your life to go well?” doesn’t have the same kind of further answer that “why do you want money?” does.

In fact, I personally think of welfare as the terminal value. If welfare is one individual’s best measure of how their own life is going, then the sum every individual’s welfare should be all that matters. You could imagine other things like objective duties to tell the truth, honor God, or do no positive violence that could ground moral theories, but you’d have to ask yourself how much of your own—and everyone else’s—welfare you would be willing to sacrifice to adhere to these duties (i.e. for them not to be merely instrumentally valuable to welfare).

There’s the classic axe murder at the door situation. Do you lie to him about his victim’s location? Do you violently intervene to stop him from killing? To the extent you believe these acts would be justified, you make some concession to welfare by giving up these other values to serve it.

The challenge to theories of the good that don’t place welfare at their foundation is then: when are you willing to make everyone (on balance) worse off by their own lights to achieve some other goal?2 I can imagine very few such cases.