ABSTRACT
The major theme in social-choice theory has been the possibility of including social choices within the realm of maximizing processes, as was done successfully with individual-choice theory. That is, it is desired to know whether social choices can be construed as maximizing a social welfare function which aggregates individuals' preferences in some fashion. Originally, Abram Bergson (1938) held that the elements of welfare economics could be derived from postulated properties of a social welfare function, or some variant such as the Compensation Principle, where admittedly in any particular application the aggregation of individuals preferences would be based upon ethical judgments. Bergson's proposition amounts to defining welfare economics as the implications of Pareto optimality, since to each ethical judgment there corresponds a Pareto-optimal choice, and conversely.
