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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Why Paretians Can’T Prescribe: Preferences, Principles, And Imperatives In Law And Policy, Robert C. Hockett
Why Paretians Can’T Prescribe: Preferences, Principles, And Imperatives In Law And Policy, Robert C. Hockett
Robert C. Hockett
Recent years have witnessed two linked revivals in the legal academy. The first is renewed interest in articulating a normative “master principle” by which legal rules might be evaluated. The second is renewed interest in the prospect that a variant of Benthamite “utility” might serve as the requisite touchstone. One influential such variant now in circulation is what the Article calls “Paretian welfarism.” This Article rejects Paretian welfarism and advocates an alternative it calls “fair welfare.” It does so because Paretian welfarism is inconsistent with ethical, social, and legal prescription, while fair welfare is what we have been groping for …
The Impossibility Of A Prescriptive Paretian, Robert C. Hockett
The Impossibility Of A Prescriptive Paretian, Robert C. Hockett
Robert C. Hockett
Most normatively oriented economists appear to be “welfarist” and Paretian to one degree or another: They deem responsiveness to individual preferences, and satisfaction of one or more of the Pareto criteria, to be a desirable attribute of any social welfare function. I show that no strictly “welfarist” or Paretian social welfare function can be normatively prescriptive. Economists who prescribe must embrace at least one value apart from or additional to “welfarism” and Paretianism, and in fact will do best to dispense with Pareto entirely.