On Value Judgement and the Ethical Nature of Economic Optimality

Herewith we are going to address the issue of value judgment in economics (and therefore of value measurability) with an essential concern for its ethical significance. This issue represents the main explicit joint between economics and ethics and underlies the idea of economic efficiency as something per se valuable. We are targeting the axioms that support the Paretian notion of economic optimality with special reference to the axiom of transitivity, which is shown to be violable without irrationality, insofar as we reject a basic Utilitarian model of value.