Robbins built value-free economics on the irrefutability of interpersonal utility claims.

Evidence

A favorite example of Robbins’s was the story of an Indian official who tried to explain the logic of the Benthamite model to a high-caste Brahman. For the Brahman, as Robbins recalled, the Benthamite idea just could not “be right.” “I am ten times as capable of happiness as that untouchable over there,” he argued. For Robbins this was an unsettling thought. While he felt no sympathy for the elitist view, it seemed obvious to him that “if the representative of some other civilization were to assure us that we were wrong, that members of his caste (or his race) were capable of experiencing ten times as much satisfaction from given incomes as members of an inferior caste (or an ‘inferior’ race), we could not refute him.” — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets, 114

Categorization

• SHARE: The Brahman anecdote is a sharp, self-contained story worth telling anyone curious about 20th-c. economic methodology debates.
• XREF: connects to: Friedman redefined economics’ goal from welfare maximization to freedom maximization. — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 118; Value systems of different kinds of people resist introspective estimation — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 281; Cost-benefit logic could portray human extinction as welfare maximizing — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 435

Broader Connections

• Value systems of different kinds of people resist introspective estimation #corroborates (0.82) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 281