Most, if not at all, practitioners of welfare economics and social choice theory are presumed to be welfaristic in their conviction. Indeed, they evaluate the goodness of an economic policy and/or economic system in terms of the welfare that people receive at the culmination outcomes thereby...

Two features of Arrow's social choice theory are critically scrutinized. The first feature is the welfarist-consequentialism, which not only bases social judgements about right or wrong actions on the assessment of their consequences, but also assesses consequences in terms of people's welfare...

In a recent paper ["Paretian Welfare Judgements and Bergsonian Social Choice," Economic Journal, Vol. 109, 1999, pp. 204-220], Suzumura proposed a possible way of relating the two schools of "new" welfare economics. According to his proposal, the logical possibility of the Paretian "new" welfare...

By allowing for the possibility that individuals recognize the intrinsic value of choice along with the instrumental value thereof, we suppose that individuals express extended preference orderings of the following type: Choosing an alternative x from an opportunity set A is better than choosing...

In a recent paper to appear in Journal of Economic Theory [Kotaro Suzumura and Yongsheng Xe, "Characterizations of Consequentialism and Non-consequentialism"], an analytical framework was developed, which allowed us to characterize the concept of consequentialism and non-consequentialism. To...