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Soc Choice Welf (2013) 40:529551
DOI 10.1007/s00355-011-0617-3
ORIGINAL PAPER
Received: 21 October 2010 / Accepted: 11 November 2011 / Published online: 4 December 2011 Springer-Verlag 2011
Abstract We show that it is possible to reconcile the utilitarian and welfarist principles under the requirement of unanimity provided that the set of proles over which the consensus is attained is rich enough. More precisely, we identify a closedness condition which, if satised by a class of n-tuples of utility functions, guarantees that the rankings of social states induced by utilitarian and welfarist unanimities over that class are identical. We illustrate the importance of the result for the measurement of unidimensional as well as multidimensional inequalities from a dominance point of view.
1 Introduction and motivation
We investigate in this article the conditions under which the application of unanimity to two well-known principles in normative economicsutilitarianism and welfarism leads to the same ranking of the social states under comparison. Following Sen (1977, 1979a,b), welfarism is the name given to the normative approaches that rank social states on the sole basis of the distribution of welfare levels achieved by individuals in those states. Hence, two social states that generate the same distribution of individual well-being are considered equivalent by any welfarist approach, even when the two
N. Gravel
Aix-Marseille University and AMSE (GREQAM), Centre de la Vieille Charit, 13002 Marseille, France e-mail: [email protected]
P. Moyes (B)
GREThA (UMR CNRS 5113), Universit de Bordeaux, CNRS, Avenue Lon Duguit, 33608 Pessac, Francee-mail: [email protected]
P. Moyes
IDEP, Centre de la Vieille Charit, 13002 Marseille, France
Utilitarianism or welfarism: does it make a difference?
Nicolas Gravel Patrick Moyes
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530 N. Gravel, P. Moyes
states differ substantially in other respects. Most welfarist approaches value individual well-beings positively and treat individuals in a symmetric manner: a societys welfare increases when its members well-beings do so and does not change as the result of a permutation of the individuals well-beings. Utilitarianism, which compares social states on the basis of the sum of the individual well-beings, is by far the most widely used of the welfarist approaches. For instance the optimal taxation model initiated by Mirrlees (1971) relies heavily on the utilitarian social welfare function when determining the properties of the tax schedule. The utilitarian rule...