On Non-Welfarist Social Ordering Functions

Welfarism is defined as a methodology that evaluates social welfare according to the level of satisfaction with regard to individuals’ subjective preferences. For this methodology, the criticisms by Dworkin (1981a, 2000), Sen (1979, 1980), and others are well known. They criticized the limited scope of information used to evaluate social welfare in the aforementioned methodology. Moreover, they criticize the welfarist neutral attitude vis-à-vis the problem of what types of preferences are satisfied. There are types of preferences, such as the utility of individual offensive tastes, that of expensive tastes, that of formation of the adaptive preference, or that of cheaper tastes such as in the case of the ‘termed housewife,’ all of which should be carefully and distinctively treated in the evaluation of social welfare from an ethical point of view. The point of these critiques is that the welfarist evaluation has no concern for such preferential differences.