John Hicks played a crucial role at birth of the “new” welfare economics founded on the informational basis of interpersonally non-comparable and ordinal utilities. Toward the end of the 1950s, however, Hicks took a bold step by declaring his farewell to the welfarist informational basis of normative economics altogether. The purpose of this paper is to gauge the depth and reach of Hicks’s farewell to the welfaristic approach to normative economics.

The chapter reflects on reasons economists have departed from welfarism when considering practical problems. Economists generally accept that using ethical values other than individual utility requires departing from neutrality but, if confronted with political contexts involving issues such as distribution, the environment or discrimination, they find it hard not to take an ethical position. Merit or public goods cannot be reduced to the satisfaction of individual utilities insofar as they are meaningful only in a social context. The individualism imposed by welfarism is also debatable when facing the interdependencies that exist between real-world individuals. Lastly, while welfare economics aims to avoid paternalism, reliance on preferences alone can be problematic. The paternalism implied by going beyond welfarism raises issues regarding democratic values such as agency and public reasoning that suggests that, instead of merely substituting non-welfarism for welfarism, there is a need for public debate on moral values. We conclude that economics, when inspired by theory and involved in practices with political consequences, should become more of a moral science.

Though economists typically eschewed non-welfarist arguments in the post-WWII period, there is at least one prominent instance in which such arguments were very much in play, both directly and as underpinnings for welfare-related arguments: The debate over the Coase theorem. This debate saw the Coase theorem regularly challenged on both welfarist (efficiency) and non-welfarist grounds. This then raises the question of what it was about the Coase theorem that led economists into this non-welfarist territory. This essay revisits the early debates over the Coase theorem, where non-welfarist arguments featured prominently, in order to bring out the nature of those arguments and attempt to understand the rationale(s) for their deployment. As we shall see, this move was a function of forces internal and external to economics, including the environmental turn in society and the profession, a concern with issues of fairness and equity in the evaluation of how to resolve externality problems, and a view, prominent in certain quarters, that the environment and environmental preservation is an end in itself.

The Introduction explains the concepts of welfarism and non-welfarism, relating it to the way economistss have typically approached the problem of welfare. Drawing on the chapters in the volume, it explores ways in which economists have departed from welfarism when tackling practical problems and discussing public policy.

This chapter shows that Sen’s (2009) non-welfarist approach to justice is greatly influenced by 1) his work on famines; 2) his empirical work on gender inequalities, specifically within the Indian society, that helped him to refine his approach to hunger; and 3) his involvement in the creation of the human development approach. All these engagements – seemingly completely separate from his theoretical work in welfare economics – have, in fact, fostered the formulation of a novel approach in which agency and public reasoning are the core elements.