ABSTRACT
The extant political and legal mechanisms for producing policy outcomes when values and rights conflict seem to be leading policy analysts astray. Further, their rationalization through the introduction of mediation would leave much to be desired. When somebody argues that a course of action is "for the good of society" they are implicitly appealing to utilitarian values. Preference utilitarianism in policy analysis finds its purest expression in welfare economics. For the economist, then, an optimal solution to any policy problem is one which maximizes the weighted sum of net benefits to individuals. Preference utilitarianism encounters considerable difficulty in inferring the elements of individual utility functions from market-related behavior. A way of circumventing this problem by appealing to more deeply-rooted human values is afforded by sociobiology, which attempts to determine the elements of utility functions from the biological nature of human beings.
