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When judging what is fair, how do we decide how much weight to assign to the conflicting interests of different classes of people? This subject has received some attention in a utilitarian context, but has been largely neglected in the case of egalitarian societies of the kind studied by John Rawls. My Game Theory and the Social Contract considers the problem for a toy society with only two citizens. This paper examines the theoretical difficulties in extending the discussion to societies with more than two citizens. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

This paper surveys the strengths and weaknesses of three widely-discussed egalitarian standards of interpersonal comparison: welfare, resource, and capability. We argue that welfare egalitarianism is beset by numerous serious problems, and should be rejected. Capability and resourcist standards conform with egalitarian convictions more closely, but each faces distinctive problems. We itemise a set of desiderata which a fully adequate account of interpersonal comparison would satisfy. We conclude that the choice between capability and resourcist standards turns on the relative importance of such an account being able to accommodate reasonable pluralism and identify inequality in a publicly verifiable manner. (European Journal of Political Research / FUB)

Abstract.This paper surveys the strengths and weaknesses of three widely–discussed egalitarian standards of interpersonal comparison:welfare, resource, andcapability. We argue that welfare egalitarianism is beset by numerous serious problems, and should be rejected. Capability and resourcist standards conform with egalitarian convictions more closely, but each faces distinctive problems. We itemise a set of desiderata which a fully adequate account of interpersonal comparison would satisfy. We conclude that the choice between capability and resourcist standards turns on the relative importance of such an account being able to accommodatereasonable pluralismand identify inequality in apublicly verifiablemanner.

In this volume a diverse group of economists, philosophers, political scientists, and psychologists address the problems, principles, and practices involved in comparing the well-being of different individuals. A series of questions lie at the heart of this investigation: What is the relevant concept of well-being for the purposes of comparison? How could the comparisons be carried out for policy purposes? How are such comparisons made now? How do the difficulties involved in these comparisons affect the status of utilitarian theories? This collection constitutes the most advanced and comprehensive treatment of one of the cardinal issues in social theory

Most moral and political theories require us to make interpersonal comparisons of welfare. This poses a challenge to the popular view that welfare consists in the satisfaction of preferences or desires, because interpersonal comparisons of preference or desire satisfaction are widely thought to be conceptually problematic, and purported solutions to this problem to lead to a hopeless subjectivism about these comparisons. In this article, I argue that the key to meeting this challenge lies in distinguishing preferences from desires, and preference satisfaction from desire satisfaction theories of welfare. More specifically, I defend three conclusions. First, interpersonal comparisons of preference satisfaction do raise a serious conceptual problem, but this same problem does not arise for interpersonal comparisons of desire satisfaction. Second, none of the existing solutions to the conceptual problem of interpersonal comparisons of preference satisfaction are satisfactory, since none explain how we can make interpersonal comparisons of preference satisfaction objectively. Third, we can at least make a limited range of objective interpersonal comparisons of desire satisfaction, and there are reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of making a wider range of such comparisons, but there is a need for further research on the topic.

The main question of this paper is how people may agree in their interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing. These comparisons are important in social ethics and for policy purposes. The paper firstly examines grounds for convergence in easy cases. Then comes a more difficult case of low convergence in order to explore a way to increase it. For this, concepts from the empirical subjective well-being literature are used: life satisfaction and vignettes. Ideas of John Harsanyi and Serge Kolm thereby receive a new look.

If interpersonal consumption or leisure comparisons affect utility, the labor supply of individuals with equal levels of non-labor income should be more similar when classified by wage rank than by the level of wages. Also, if concern for relative leisure dominates the concern for relative consumption, then at a given wage level, wage rank should be positively related to hours supplied. Evidence of a relationship between hours supplied and wage rank is found, but conflicting evidence exists on the direction of the relationship. The most recent data suggest that concern for relative leisure dominates the concern for relative consumption.