Summary. Welfare provision serves mainly the physical and material interests of recipients.
Interests are linked both with people's needs, which are socially defined, and with what
people want. If people can be mistaken about where their interests lie, their welfare will
not be served by considering their wants alone.
Social welfare is not simply the sum of individual welfares, and one concept cannot
be derived from the other. Some interests may be held in common. Equally, however,
there may be conflicts between interests, and some may bear costs for the benefit of
others.
In its broadest sense, the idea of 'welfare' refers to 'well-being', or what is 'good' for people.
Understood more narrowly, it can be taken to refer to the provision of social services -
principally health care, housing, social security, education and social work. The connection
between the two uses rests in the role of social services as 'the provision of welfare'. Part
of the purpose of social services is, ideally, altruistic - 'doing good' to people. There are
curative approaches: people who have something wrong with them receive 'treatment' to
put it right. Social services can be developmental: a society in which individuals are valued
should have the facilities to help them realise their potential. And social services may
protect people; the 'safety net' which the services provide help to remove the uncertainty
associated with need, a protection against for example the problems of old age, disability or
poverty.
However, the provision of welfare is not necessarily for the benefit of the recipients
alone. Townsend suggests that
'social services are those means developed and institutionalised by society to
promote ends which are wholly or primarily social'. (1976, p.28)
In many ways, measures which benefit the individual person are important for society:
societies are, after all, made up of people. But there are also aims which can be seen as
more for the benefit of the whole society than for any person within it. The social services
can, for example, reinforce economic policy. They can be seen as a way to achieve equality
or social justice. They may be an instrument of social change. They can also, conversely, be
a means of maintaining social order.
The provision of welfare is contentious. There are many different and conflicting
views of what is good for the individual or society. This book is an examination of the
principles which guide such judgments. Its aim is to explain the values which are being
applied, to examine the grounds on which disagreements of principle arise, and to relate
principles to practical issues of welfare provision.
Individual welfare
We refer to what is 'good' for people as being in their interests - interests being those things
which lead to well-being. Feinberg uses the term 'welfare interests' to refer to the interests
that he considers fundamental. They include physical health and vigour; physical integrity
and functioning; the absence of pain or disfigurement; a minimum degree of intellectual
activity; emotional stability; the absence of groundless anxieties and resentments;
engagement in a normal social life; a minimum amount of wealth, income and financial
security; a tolerable social and physical environment; and some freedom from interference
by others. (1980, p.32) These interests are 'basic', in his view, because without them a
person cannot be a person. In other words, welfare interests are needs - items that are
essential.
Maslow (1943) writes, as a psychologist, about a 'hierarchy' of needs, a series of
conditions which must be met for each person.
'There are at least five sets of goals which we may call basic needs. These are briefly
physiological, safety, love, esteem and self-actualisation. ... These basic goals are
related to one another, being arranged in a hierarchy of prepotency. This means
that the most prepotent goal will monopolise consciousness ... The less prepotent
needs are minimised, even forgotten or denied. But when a need is fairly well
satisfied, the next prepotent (higher) need emerges ... ' (1943, p.395)
In other words, physiological needs are more important than safety, safety than the need
for love, and so on. There are three main problems with this concept. In the first place,
Maslow's order of priority is very arguable - is love really subordinate to safety? Secondly, it
is not clear that basic needs can be ordered in a 'hierarchy' at all. In some cases, the value
of measures to look after a person's physiological needs is clearly reduced if other needs are
not met; many people would prefer to be malnourished and free rather than to be well-fed
in prison. This implies that people are affected, not so much by a hierarchy, as by a whole
set of interdependent needs. Thirdly, it is difficult to apply the approach directly to the
provision of welfare. Education is almost certainly of less importance than a person's
emotional needs, but education is largely organised as a social service, and provision for
emotional needs is not. If there is a pressing need for state-run computer dating, the case
has not been made out. On the face of it, the concept of 'welfare' seems to take in every
aspect of a person's life - physical, emotional, material and spiritual. Robson, writing about
the 'welfare state', emphasises that 'welfare is of unlimited scope'. (1976, p.174) But in
practice, the concept is rather more limited than a general concern with 'well-being' would
suggest. In the context of social policy, the idea of 'welfare' refers primarily to physical and
material well-being - not because the areas of emotional and spiritual life are irrelevant, but
because it is normally considered to be beyond the scope of the social services to provide
for them.
The sorts of areas in which 'needs' are commonly taken to occur include, Harvey
suggests, food, housing, medical care, education, social and environmental service,
consumer goods, recreational opportunities, neighbourhood amenities and transport
facilities (1973, p.102). The exclusion of employment opportunities from this list is, Jones et
al. note, an illustration of the way in which ideas of need change over time. (1978, p.28) It
is fairly easy to add other needs to the list: they might include physical care (like help in
bathing or dressing), clothing, fuel, or simply the money to buy things. But the list is not
infinite; to a large extent, it is limited to those areas in which some sort of social provision
might be made. The statement that people are in 'need', that they must have something,
effectively constitutes a claim against other people to make some sort of response.
Within each category of need, there are degrees of classification - 'greater' or 'lesser'
needs - depending on how strong the claim is and how 'essential' the need appears to be.
An example of this is poverty, the lack of material resources. People are not simply said to
be 'poor' or 'not poor'; they may be destitute (almost totally without resources), poor,
deprived, or disadvantaged. Within these categories, there are further gradations - like
'very poor', 'poor', 'fairly' poor. These are not precise terms with a universally agreed
meaning, and they may overlap with the other categories; there is no clear distinction, for
example, between 'fairly poor' and 'deprived'. In the case of other 'needs', there are
gradations made between those things which are needed more and those which are
needed less. This may mean either that both things are necessary, but one is more
important than the other; or that a condition has only been partially satisfied. People in
general need food to live, and to be healthy; the food might be enough to preserve life but
not health. A person without any food at all is more 'in need' than someone who does not
have food which is adequately nutritious, but it makes perfectly good sense to talk about
both people as being 'in need' - which means that both people have a claim, even if one
claim is stronger than the other.