Value judgment: search for a pragmatic welfare theory

The welfare economists have been confronted with the controversies of interpersonal comparisons or of value judgments for a long period of time. Following Pareto most of the conventional theory of welfare economics rested on the assumed value judgment that if one person was better off and no one was worse off welfare was increased. But without the knowledge of utility or welfare function none can be sure that satisfying those conditions is better than violating them. Moreover Paretian value judgment did not apply to a situation where some persons were benefited and some were harmed by some policy change. . Professor Amartya Kumar Sen in his article “Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability”, Econometrica 38, May1970, has made an attempt to provide a fairly rigorous presentation of a possible framework of interpersonal comparability. In this paper I have found out how far Prof. Sen’s partial comparability analysis suits our practical problem of evaluation of alternative social states in respect of social welfare. At the same time I have tried to point out unexplored part of the problems of measurement of social welfare and comparability. In course of my exploration I have kept it in my mind that both welfare and non-welfare information constitute the appropriate basis of social welfare evaluation.