“Rather than forcing them to make value judgments, it allows them to talk about the normative framework of their model without having to resort to moral or philosophical discourse that they are ill-equipped to deal with”

This framework does force people to make value judgements. Also by endogenising the social welfare function Landsburg hasn’t reduced the set of normative judgements we have to make, he’s just rearranged them. The welfare function itself is just a means to an end, the end is the outcomes. By valuing different welfare function we are implicitly placing values on the set of outcomes that the welfare function produces.

However, if this framework is a more efficient way of solving social welfare problems, that is a good thing. But I don’t think it changes the issues associated with the value-laden sections of economics.

It is true that the modeller still needs to define a set of preferences over welfare functions. However, this is equivalent to defining preferences over bundles of goods. I think you’re asking a bit much if you expect the model to endogenously determine an appropriate utility function. What this paper does is show that the set of plausible welfare functions is limited, given a particular set of preferences. Preferences are always exogenous in microeconomics. Ideally, the function to be maximised arises endogenously from those preferences and a few other assumptions about rationality. This paper shows how that can happen in the context of welfare maximisation.

From a quick skim it seems to me that this paper is endogenising the choice between welfare functions? As a result, the value judgement the government makes is based on the social preference of their own welfare function.

Furthermore, if you actually wanted to get anything significant out of the model, you would have to decide on a preference ranking in order to apply an appropriate utility function, which is again a value-judgement.

Also, this idea seems sort of funny to me. We are defining social preferences over welfare function which define social preferences over outcomes. All we are doing is moving our set of assumptions from the ‘ends’ to the ‘means’ of maximising welfare. If we have preferences over certain social welfare functions, surely we are making value judgements about the final set of outcomes implicitly.