• DOI:10.1086/257678
• Corpus ID: 222434288

Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility

@article{Harsanyi1955CardinalWI,
  title={Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility},
  author={John C. Harsanyi},
  journal={Journal of Political Economy},
  year={1955},
  volume={63},
  pages={309 - 321}
}

• J. Harsanyi
• Published 1 August 1955
• Journal of Political Economy

I T HE naive concept of social welfare as a sum of intuitively measurable and comparable individual cardinal utilities has been found unable to withstand the methodological criticism of the Pareto school. Professor Bergson2 has therefore recommended its replacement by the more general concept of a social welfare function, defined as an arbitrary mathematical function of economic (and other social) variables, of a form freely chosen according to one's personal ethical (or political) value judgments. Of course, in this terminology everybody will have a social welfare function of his own, different from that of everybody else, except to the extent to which different individuals' value judgments happen to coincide with one another. Actually, owing to the prevalence of individualistic value judgments in our society, it has been generally agreed that a social welfare function should be an increasing function of the utilities of individuals: if a certain situation, X, is preferred by an individual to another situation, Y, and if none of the other individ-