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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Opponents of Bergson and Samuelson misunderstood their position rather than successfully refuting it.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates that no social welfare function can satisfy minimal rationality conditions while deriving from ordinal non-comparable preferences.
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    • 2.If W(U1,…,Un) cannot be coherently constructed from ordinal inputs alone, the Bergson-Samuelson framework presupposes interpersonal comparability whether or not they acknowledged it.
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    • 3.Critics like Little and Sen were therefore exposing a structural dependency, not merely misreading the framework's stated commitments.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Robbins argued influentially that interpersonal utility comparisons are empirically meaningless, removing the scientific basis for any cardinal weighting within W(U1,…,Un).
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    • 2.Samuelson's response that the social welfare function merely reflects an ethical observer's value judgments concedes that the framework imports normative content that ordinal preferences alone cannot supply.
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    • 3.This concession vindicates critics who charged that the framework obscures rather than resolves the foundational problem of aggregating distinct persons' welfare.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Bergson and Samuelson held that individual utility functions are to be constructed from preference orderings via fairness principles, not assumed to carry cardinal or interpersonally comparable information.
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    • 2.The logical possibility of constructing such utility functions from ordinal non-comparable preferences is indisputable.
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    • 3.Critics treated the W(U1,…,Un) formula as requiring richer utility information than Bergson and Samuelson actually claimed.
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    Strongest counterpoint
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