Evolving Preferences andPolicy Advice in Democratic Society

Beyond its explanatory ambitions as positive science, economics has always had its normativeor applied branch that aims at providing advice about how man’s socio-economic conditionmight be improved. Under the name welfare economics the discipline’s normative branch hasbeen formalized, in the spirit of Benthamite utilitarianism, as an attempt to generalize thenotion of rational, maximizing choice from the individual to the societal level by aggregatingindividual preferences into a compound measure of social welfare. The theoreticalconsistency and practical applicability of this aggregationist approach has long been thesubject of controversy, and in response to objections welfare economics underwent variousmodifications and reformulations.[...]