The authors view is that, extreme forms of philosophical skepticism aside, there is no problem in general about the possibility of making interpersonal comparisons of happiness or of relative well-being. Within contemporary political philosophy and welfare economics, however, interpersonal comparisons present a problem insofar as it is assumed that the judgments or relative well-being on which social policy decisions, or claims of justice, are based should not reflect value judgments. The author argues that this idea, which gives rise to the widely held view that a person’s well-being should be measured by the degree to which his or her preferences are satisfied, also undermines the moral significance and even the intelligibility of the interpersonal comparisons that the proponents of that view suggest we should make.
