Cardinal welfare, individualistic ethics, and interpersonal comparisons of utility

Abstract

This work introduces a social welfare function and a concept of interpersonal comparison of utility based on modern utility theory. It is shown that ethical postulates associated with the social welfare function, along with postulates for interpersonal comparison of utility, can be derived from logical analysis of ethical and subjective preferences. The social welfare function is a weighted sum of individual cardinal utility functions of which an additive form of social welfare function is a special, limiting case. Whether the weights have an objective basis, or depend on subjective value judgments, is shown to depend on how much factual information about individual characteristics is available. – AI-generated abstract.