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6 - Value Judgement within Pareto’s Economic and Sociological Approaches to Welfare

from Part I - Plurality of Welfare in the Making of Welfare Economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2021

By
Rogério Arthmar  and
Michael McLure
Edited by
Roger E. Backhouse ,
Antoinette Baujard  and
Tamotsu Nishizawa
Roger E. Backhouse
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham and Erasmus University Rotterdam
Antoinette Baujard
Affiliation:
Université de Lyon et Université Jean Monnet à Saint-Étienne
Tamotsu Nishizawa
Affiliation:
Teikyo University Japan
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Summary

Pareto’s advocacy of ‘ethical neutrality’ in social science is well known, but, over the course of his scholarly career, he devoted more and more attention to accommodating the influence of sentiment (value judgement) within welfare theory. This paper plots Pareto’s evolving treatment of value judgement from his early economic works on production efficiency and collective economic welfare through to his mature sociological reflections on collective social welfare. Within that context, Pareto’s contribution to the ‘new welfare economics’, as a stream of what John Hicks called economic welfarism, is discussed; as is his attempt to accommodate the values of each individual member of society within his sociological approach to collective welfare. However, in contrast to the position taken under Hicks’s conception of non-welfarism, the policy advisor who adopts Pareto’s sociology of welfare is still obliged to follow an ethically neutral position when considering the values of individuals to provide advice on improving social welfare.

Keywords

Economic welfareIndividual utilityCompensation criterionValue judgementsSocial utility
Type
Chapter
Information
Welfare Theory, Public Action, and Ethical Values
Revisiting the History of Welfare Economics
 , pp. 135 - 156
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

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