Envoy

Where the modern foundations of welfare economics and the received theory of economic knowledge and policy in general, have been founded on a quite extreme scepticism about our ability to answer questions of the social good, even about the meaningfulness of a concept of a social good, the theory advanced in this work would yield the result that questions of the social good, like questions of other kinds, can indeed be framed coherently; can indeed be made the subject of reasonable and openended discussion; can indeed sustain objective inquiry and investigation as to their answers. We have seen more generally that all questions need to be understood within as careful descriptions as possible of their implicit and explicit contexts. Also we have seen it to be of central importance to distinguish the question whether there can be an objective answer to a given question from the question of who, if anyone, should be thought of as possessing the best or most reasonable answer to give to it. Both these considerations may take on an acute significance when it is the determination of the social good which is under discussion. The former would imply that while we can bring to bear all and any principles and precedents that we need in answering a given question of the social good, there may be no universal or absolute theories either necessary or possible from which all answers about the social good have to be derived regardless of particular context and circumstance. The latter would imply that once a question of the social good has been carefully framed within its implicit and explicit context, the true political question which it becomes necessary to address is that of identifying who in the given context should be thought of as having the best answer to it, who should be considered the expert, who should be thought to have the authoritative opinion about it, who should be granted the

authority to decide upon it. And this may be the more fruitful way to interpret how most actual discussions of economic and public policy do in fact proceed. Here is a question as to what should be done in a given context-now the question is, who has the best answer to it?—who should make the decision-mother or father, child or parent, parents or judge, judiciary or executive, executive or legislature, legislature or electorate, government or private sector, local government or state government or federal government, rule or discretion, and so on indefinitely. It may be that political discussions take on the vehemence they sometimes do precisely because the answers to questions of the social good, whether in the family or in public life, are not easy to determinethere may be manifold and complex considerations needing to be accounted for, often within a fleeting span of time, without either principles or precedents or evidence readily at hand, with the private interests and emotions and mutual bigotry and mistrust of the participants all inextricably involved. Certainly Pareto’s idea that if an outcome can be made to obtain in which the positions of some are improved while the positions of no others are worsened then that would be a good thing, may be part of the considerations entering into an inquiry of what is the right thing to be done in given circumstances. But it would be at most one among any of a number of considerations which may be relevant to the matter at hand, and must be required to weigh in with them as well and not assumed to be the only or absolute or supreme value-as the humean economist, struck by his debilitating scepticism, would have us believe.