Welfare, preference and freedom

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the informational foundation of welfare-economic evaluation and the empirical bases of social welfare judgments. More particularly, it is concerned with the empirical implications of basing social evaluation on individual freedom, as opposed to individual welfare. This involves a substantial shift from the informational focus of standard welfare economics, with its dominant tradition of ‘welfarism’. While the claims of individual preferences to be in the informational base of social welfare judgments are frequently seen as parasitic on welfarism, the claims relate more robustly to freedom-based social evaluation. In an axiomatic examination, it is argued that preference and freedom are very deeply interrelated, and that an affirmation of the intrinsic importance of freedom must inter alia assign fundamental importance to preference. This goes against some common presumptions about assesing freedom, and also against some axioms that have been proposed in the literature on ‘measuring freedom’.