Perspectives on Morality and Human Well-Being. Syed Nawab Haider Naqvi
in a position to manage their own affairs and to take part in social cooperation on a footing of mutual respect under appropriately equal conditions” [Rawls (1999); p. xv].13 This conception of a just society, which distinguishes itself by procedural impartiality as well, differs radically from that presented by a much narrowly defined utilitarian consequentialism – and is light years away from Nozickian non-consequentialism. Rather than compress all aspects of human well-being into just one object of value, i.e., the metric of utility, it is more realistic to recognise it to be pluralistic in character. This is because the criteria used to evaluate social states are essentially diverse. To this end, normative collective-choice theories (with some notable exceptions) move away from the subjective mental-state experiences to more objectively ‘seen’ evaluators of human happiness – e.g., primary goods, resources, functionings – all of which assign centrality to human freedom and admit the ‘possibility’ of improving social conditions by egalitarian public policy.
i) The Many Faces of Social Justice / Welfare
The analysis presented in the preceding section highlights the importance of the ‘right’ moral values – ones that guide individuals to undertake socially desirable activities, and those which enhance social justice.
a) Social Welfare
Social justice, or distributive equity, is generally understood to mean maximising social welfare in an individualistic economy. But this usage is not free from ambiguity because social welfare does not always imply distributive equity. Positive public-choice theories regard Pareto-optimality as an index of social good or welfare; which, however, is a misnomer. Even some normative public-choice theories toy with the idea of maximising social welfare along the Pareto-optimality frontier (i.e., choosing an optimal point on the frontier) with the help of a distortion-free optimal lump-sum taxes and transfer mechanism. This intellectual feat was achieved by Bergson (1938) and Samuelson (1947) who proved that maximising social welfare is equivalent to maximising a Bergson–Samuelson social welfare function.14 But these efforts have been much ado about nothing! The reason is that the basic components of the Bergson–Samuelson social welfare function do not allow it to address the problem of distributive justice. These are: (a) the distributionally-neutral Pareto-optimality criterion, with its unifocal concentration on efficiency-related issues; (b) a neutral lump-sum transfer of resources, which is no more than a hypocritical neo-classical trick of looking egalitarian without actually having to distribute anything; and (c) the impossibility of making interpersonal comparisons of individual utilities, which are no more than mental-state comparisons of pleasures or desires.15 The way to cure the neo-classicals’ trained incapacity to handle distributional issues is either to discard utilitarianism, or reject the impossibility of making interpersonal comparisons of individual utilities, or both. Harsanyi (1955) rejects the neo-classical’s consensus about the impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility, but retains the utilitarian calculus; while Rawls (1971; 1999) and Sen (1999a) reject both.16 And, chameleonlike, ‘social welfare’ changes its ‘colour’ and meaning in each of these formulations.
b) Harsanyi’s Just Social Welfare Function
Take interpersonal comparisons of utilities to be a factual proposition, and assume that if x is preferred to y by the individuals in a society, it is also preferred by the society as a whole. Then a remarkable result follows – namely, that social welfare (W) is a sum of the individual utilities.17 Harsanyi’s originality is to combine self-interested individualism (i.e., no role is assigned to the state even by implication) with the moral quality of caring for others. The deus ex machina is to assume that: (a) individual preferences can be divided into one’s self-interested personal preferences and his/her moral preferences which are an indicator of his/her concern for other persons in society; (b) that every individual has an equal probability of being any other individual; and (c) that each individual has the capacity of being in someone else’s shoes (determined by mental comparisons alone). Here (b) and (c) provide the ethical foundations of Harsanyi’s (1955) formulation.18 Once these assumptions are made, the impartiality of social decisions is ensured. Here, social decisions are made, not by the state, but by Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator”, who possesses the entirely agreeable qualities (a) to (c), and whose preferences are representable by a social welfare function.
The basic contributions here are the following: (a) light is shed on the processes of making just collective decisions – namely, by ensuring that these are made by the “impartial spectator”, who does not have prior information about his/her chances in life. Such impartial decisions have a high probability of gaining unanimity in a democratic society where individual preferences matter. (b) The additive form of Harsanyi’s social welfare function (i.e., that individual preferences should be added
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