This traces the transition from classical to neoclassical utilitarianism in political philosophy and economics, centered on the shift from cardinal utility (interpersonal comparisons of utility, as in Bentham's classical utilitarianism) to ordinal utility, which ranks preferences without measuring their magnitude and thereby avoids interpersonal utility comparisons. Neoclassical welfare economics, developed through the Pareto principle, formalizes this via indifference curves (reflecting diminishing marginal utility and governed by transitivity of preference), the concepts of Pareto superiority, inferiority, and optimality, and the Edgeworth box diagram, which identifies a contract curve of Pareto-efficient allocations reachable through voluntary market exchange. The theory belongs to political philosophy and normative economics, situated within debates over distributive justice, and it demonstrates that Pareto efficiency is silent on redistribution between the two "Pareto-undecidable" regions where one party gains and the other loses.
This traces the transition from classical to neoclassical utilitarianism in political philosophy and economics, centered on the shift from cardinal utility (interpersonal comparisons of utility, as i…