SEMINAIRE DE RECHERCHE EN ECONOMIE - GATE Lyon Saint-Etienne : JEAN-SEBASTIEN GHARBI

Jean-Sébastien Gharbi, REGARDS, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne présentera un séminaire intitulé : Welfarism and Ethical Neutrality.

Thème de recherche / Main topics : Welfarism

Résumé / abstract  : Sen (1977, 1979) made clear that an ethical tenet, namely “welfarism”, was lying at the core of welfare economics. In other words, he showed that using the then available welfare economics tools of analysis implied endorsing a doctrinal content in terms of moral philosophy. Such a claim was threatening welfare economics to be considered only as an ideological corpus. This certainly explains why some specialists of welfare economics, and especially of social choice, clarified the meaning of welfarism by distinguishing two kinds of welfarisms. The first is a philosophical welfarism ; it involves a specific moral content. The second one is a “formal welfarism” (d’Aspremont & Mongin, 1998 ; Fleurbaey 2003a) and it is presented as strictly neutral in terms of ethical values. The present paper aims at discussing the claim that formal welfarism is ethically neutral. The idea of formal welfarism neutrality depends on the assumption that it is possible to set a clear cut separation between informational basis and aggregation rule - in other words that there is no influence of one on the other. On the contrary we argue that there are feedback effects both of informational basis on aggregation rule and of aggregation rule on informational basis.

Co-authors : Yves Meinard

Jean-Sébastien Gharbi