Sen opens with a parable in which a woman asks whom she should employ: the poorest person, the unhappiest person, or the one for whom the job would result in the greatest improvement in quality of life. These three options encapsulate how creating “different informational bases” (85)—or asking different questions—can lead to changes in policy actions. The choice of what to do with that knowledge depends on a person’s ethical stance. This chapter evaluates the ethical theories of utilitarianism, libertarianism, and Rawlsian theory of justice for development economics and how they depend on these informational bases.

Jeremy Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism defines utility as happiness or pleasure, which he asserts can be at least approximately measured. Utilitarianism focuses solely on results (consequentialism), judges solely on increased happiness (welfarism), and considers only total happiness for a population rather than individual effects (sum-ranking). Injustice denotes a decrease in aggregate happiness. Given the difficulties in measuring the intensity of happiness, some modern utilitarian thinkers focus on “choice-based accounting” instead of pleasure: That is, they say utility has increased if people can opt for a new good or opportunity and choose it over the previous status quo. The advantage of utilitarianism is that it forces people to focus on the resulting wellbeing of people.