ALLOWING DISAGREEMENT IN EVALUATIONS OF SOCIAL-WELFARE

There is no consensus on how to measure interpersonally comparable, ca rdinal utility. Despite of this, people repeatedly make welfare evalua tions in their everyday lives. However, people do not always agree on such evaluations, and this is one important reason for political disag reements. Thus, to keep in control of the normative premises, decision makers may prefer information which can be used as input to an arbitr ary social welfare function to information which is the output from a social welfare function specified by the analyst. In this paper we try to identify and simplify sufficient welfare indicators; information w hich enables decision makers to arrive at welfare evaluations of socia l states or projects, according to their own ethical beliefs. Our conc lusion is that providing factual information about different populatio n groups, their social state, size, and characteristics, may be better for this purpose than the more traditional approach of focusing on or dinal utility information.