Beccaria’s theories of social welfare
In the history of economic thought, Beccaria is occasionally included among the fathers of modern utilitarianism. Scholars have debated the appropriateness of such inclusion, given the frequent use of contractarian theories in his work.
Beccaria’s work shows that utilitarian theories can be built on contractarian premises, and his combined use of contrasting paradigms proves that the two perspectives can successfully coexist.According to some scholars, Beccaria utilized a hypothetical contractarian framework to justify the purely utilitarian choices of positive law. In reality, he successfully combined the utilitarian and contractarian perspectives into a single coherent framework. In this respect, contractarianism helped him avoid the paradoxes of pure utilitarianism. Additionally, Beccaria provided a powerful inspiration to Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian approach to social welfare, yet anticipating the more modern contractarian justification of utilitarianism adopted by contemporary philosophers such as John Rawls.
The contractarian starting point of Beccaria’s work served at the same time to legitimize3 and to limit the domain of utilitarianism. From the social contract, it followed that the purpose of government was to promote social welfare. The social contract, however, required that the happiness of every individual be taken into account. Thus the maximization could not be undertaken on the basis of mere aggregate values. In this respect, Beccaria’s notion of social welfare - although providing the inspiration for Bentham’s definition4 - differs substantially from the Benthamite approach, anticipating the contemporary paradigms of social welfare formulated by Rawls and John Nash. It is not enough to maximize aggregate utility in order to maximize the happiness of society.
It is not clear, however, that Beccaria was fully conscious of the dilemma of social welfare maximization.5 In his work he alternatively appears to refer to a conception of social well-being given by the summation of individual well-being, and to different paradigms where the internal division of wealth enters as a competing criterion of social welfare. The concern for the latter, however, appears to be mostly semantic.6