Welfare maximization self-undermines by denying the collective community’s existence and judgment it depends on

Evidence

In the long run, this book argues, the welfaremaximization approach not only proves disruptive to the project of reasoning through certain daunting collective issues, such as international and intergenerational environmental responsibility, but also undermines even its own attractiveness as a standard of social choice. As with impartial optimization and its agencyeroding effect on the individual level, the mandate of welfare maximization is curiously selfundermining. Proponents of the economic reform project argue that a rational po liti cal community should recognize the various pathologies that infect the exercise of its collective agency— bureaucratic excesses, interestgroup machinations, moments of populist hysteria— and conclude that its collective selfidentity is best expressed in the form of selfnegation through formalized welfare analysis. Despite the surface appeal of such a costbenefi t state, the case for surrendering collective responsibility to a program of optimal decision making lacks one essential element, namely, an account of how a po litical community can maintain conviction in a standard of social choice that implicitly denigrates the community’s judgment and, indeed, denies the community’s very existence. Before entering fi nally into this costbenefi t state, we should demand from the economic reformers a persuasive account of how our community will continue to cohere, once we have given up the language within which we recognize and reshape ourselves. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 59

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘community coheres through language in which it recognizes and reshapes itself’ connects to the Storytelling thread in the polyad. — connects to: Utilitarianism can only treat people consistently by denying their sense of being ethical agents. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 122; Collective values arise through institutions, not from atomized preference sums — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 312; The autonomous-individual ideal of citizenship structurally prevents acknowledging group-based harms. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 381 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Welfare economics must deny its own incompleteness to sustain its optimization logic. #expands (0.85) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 269
• The autonomous-individual ideal of citizenship structurally prevents acknowledging group-based harms. #qualifies (0.72) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 381