Bergson's Social Welfare Function And Value Judgements

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Bergson’s social welfare function is supposed to be dependent on changes in economic events that have a direct effect on individual welfares. The ordinal utility level of an individual is a function of his own consumption of goods and services and not of others.
Moreover, the utility level of an individual depends on his own value judgments regarding the composition of different goods and services consumed which depends upon his tastes. An individual may derive more utility from the consumption of liquor whereas another individual may derive very nominal utility or no utility at all from it.
Social Welfare Function and Value Judgements:
So far we have been mainly concerned with the value judgements of individuals regarding their

The social welfare function and its form depend upon the value judgements of the person or institution that the society has authorised to decide. The authorised person or institution may be anybody but for true value judgements regarding the social welfare he must be unbiased because changes in social welfare will depend upon his value judgements.
“These judgements as to what constitute justice and virtue in distribution may be those of the economist himself or those set up by the legislature, by some other governmental authority or by some other unspecified person or group.” A social welfare function can be attained by common consensus or it may be forced upon the society by a dictator.
Since the forms of social welfare functions are known by value judgements about social wel¬fare, therefore there arises the problem of finding an authority who could give purely unbiased value judgements. Bergson and Samuelson have assumed a “Superman” who provides value judge¬ments about changes in social

Given a family of social indifference curves, the effect of a proposed change in policy on social welfare can be evalu¬ated. In terms of Fig. 42.1 any policy change that moves the economy from Q to T is an improve¬ment. Similarly, a movement from Q to S or from R to S also represents an improvement in social welfare, and a movement from T to Q or T to S represents a decrease in social welfare. A movement along the same social indifference curve represents no change in the level of social welfare.
Analysis of Pareto optimality failed to provide a ‘unique optimum solution’ which represents maximum social welfare. There are a large number of solutions which are optimum on the basis of Pareto criterion. In terms of Edgeworth-box diagram every point on the contract curve represents the optimum position. In terms of Grand Utility Possibility Frontier, all points on it are Pareto optimal or economically efficient. But Pareto criterion does not tell us the best of