ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Envy-freeness or distributive justice according to the individualistic ethics
Author: Desreumaux Vincent
At the beginning of the twentieth century, most welfare economists, like Pigou for instance, had adopted the utilitarian criterion. But this criterion has been, in the 1930’s, the target of methodological criticism, essentially developed by Robbins and Hicks. Doubts about the empirical significance of interpersonal comparisons of utility ruled out the utilitarian calculus. Hence, welfare economics had to look for a new criterion, but also for a new ethical basis, since utilitarianism was rejected. The Pareto criterion presented itself, and the paretian ethics also. We name this ethics "individualistic ethics" since it is based on the sole value judgment of the respect of individual preferences. But the conclusions that can be reached with this criterion are restricted, and the history of welfare economics hence became a succession of various tries to broaden the scope of the paretian welfare judgments. In this paper, we study a particular episode of this story: at the end of the 1960’s emerged an approach based on the criterion of envy-freeness (Foley, Varian, Kolm). The aim of this kind of analysis was to ground welfare judgments, and especially judgments of distributive justice, on the sole basis of non comparable individual preferences. The object of our contribution is to underline the fact that the desire to avoid interpersonal comparisons certainly is, for a part, the consequence of a will to avoid the arbitrary value judgments of a "judge" who, like in the utilitarian tradition, could arbitrate conflicts of different individual preferences. We also try to show that the difficulties met by the theory of envy-freeness contribute to show that the paretian individualistic ethics is unadapted to a satisfying analysis of social welfare and, a fortiori, of social justice.
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