A Welfarist Version of Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem

Abstract

Harsanyi’s Aggregation Theorem has often been dismissed as being irrelevant to utilitarianism, and thus void of ethical content. Some of these ob jections can be met by reformulating Harsanyi’s theorem in the multi-profile context of Social Welfare Functionals theory. The present paper aims at showing that appropriately formulated single-profile variants of the theorem also meet the ob jections, and thus arguably make sense in terms of utilitarianism. More precisely, using an “enlarged” single-profile approach, we derive a Harsanyi-like representation which is both anonymous and compatible with meaningful comparisons of cardinal utility functions. These results depend on reformulating Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem in the social-choice the- oretic framework of welfarism.