Engineering Concepts for Public Policy: Wellbeing and Disability

Abstract

Public policy often requires giving specification to some concept or another. We might be aiming to promote HEALTH, or make officials more ACCOUNTABLE or reduce DISCRIMINATION, or remove barriers faced by people who have DISABILITIES, and so on; and while sometimes the concept in question is widely well-understood in such a way that specification is unnecessary, at other times we need to say what we mean when referring to that concept. We need an account of the concept in question: an answer to a question like "What is health?," "What is wellbeing?," "What is accountability," "What is disability?," and so on. Philosophers are experts in answering "What is X?" questions, so we might think that they would be a useful resource for those in public policy. However, in the case of many important concepts in public policy, philosophers are in deep disagreement as to what the correct account of that concept is. So, philosophy often can't provide an expert consensus to which those in public policy can turn. This dissertation argues that there's another way in which philosophers can help those in public policy find accounts of important concepts. There is a branch of philosophy, conceptual engineering, which is concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of concepts and terms. We can use the tools of conceptual engineering to the best account of a concept to use in public policy. I'll argue for this by demonstration, using the tools of conceptual engineering to find the best accounts of wellbeing and disability for public policy. After introducing the dissertation in Chapter One, in Chapter Two I'll develop a method of conceptual engineering for finding accounts of wellbeing for practical contexts, such as national wellbeing measurement, public health, clinical psychological care, poverty alleviation, social work, and so on. I call this method Contextual Prescriptivism. I'll then apply Contextual Prescriptivism to two related practical contexts: Chapter Three will find the best account of wellbeing for government measures of national adult wellbeing ("wellbeing frameworks"), and Chapter Four will do so for government measures of national child wellbeing. Chapter Five shows that the account of adult wellbeing I develop in Chapter Three solves problems for how wellbeing frameworks serve future generations. Finally, Chapter Six turns from wellbeing to disability. I argue that attention to how accounts of disability work in public policy shows that the Ameliorative Approach is the method we should use in philosophy of disability to answer the question of what disability is. Show more