ABSTRACT
Measuring social welfare is considered a difficult, if not impossible, task. The theory of social welfare is rather well developed for the favorable case when there exists an accepted interpersonally comparable measure of individual wellbeing and the difficulty is confined to the issue of aggregating a vector of individual levels of well-being into a synthetic measure. The main ethical issue in such aggregation is the degree of preference for equality (or aversion to inequality) embedded in the social welfare function, and there is some consensus that some strict preference for equality is warranted, although there is much less agreement about whether this preference for equality should go all the way down to the extreme maximin criterion.
