Like all other significant social science concepts – liberty, equality, justice, power and so on – the notion of welfare defies agreed definition. There is some agreement at the edges, at the superficial level, but this agreement disappears as one delves deeper into its detailed meaning.

At the very basic material level, the notion of welfare refers to the individual's basic material needs: food, water, clothing, housing, heating and suchlike needs. There is, however, no agreement on what exactly the phrase ‘suchlike needs’ covers or the level at which the agreed basic needs should be satisfied. There is even less agreement on what non-basic material needs should be included in the notion of welfare, even though it is generally acknowledged that such non-basic needs change over time and they vary from one society to another – that is, that non-basic material needs are relative to place and time. Many commentators would, for example, include a radio or a television set among the non-basic material needs in advanced industrial affluent societies but they are likely to exclude these items when referring to the welfare of people living in impoverished countries today. Clearly, they would not even consider them in societies before these items were invented. Economic growth and economic affluence create new physical needs all the time.

At the non-material level, there are some conditions which are generally accepted as being basic and hence an integral part of welfare. The best example of this is safety or security. People may have enough or even more than enough to satisfy their material needs but their welfare suffers if they are in constant physical danger or in fear of their lives. But that is as far as agreement goes. Would one include individual liberty in the same category as individual safety bearing in mind that, on one hand, millions of people over the centuries have been prepared to sacrifice their life in order to promote their liberty, and, on the other, millions have lived under tyrannies with their material needs amply satisfied? More controversially, would one include faith, happiness or justice in the notion of welfare?

Attempts to create a ‘hierarchy of needs’, with material needs at the base and non-material needs above it, make sense only in contemporary affluent democratic societies, but not in all societies.