I need help with understanding the meaning of this paragraph

English is my second language and I'm struggling to understand this paragraph. Its for my assessment. Can anyone help me to simplify. I put in bold the sentences I'm most confused about.

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Beyond Welfarism

Why does Sen take issue with focusing on the space of individual utilities? His essential argument is that its informational base is insufficiently rich: the same distribution of individual welfares may coexist with very different scores on other dimensions that are important to social evaluation. A theory of welfare must be based on more than individual utilities, whether they are interpreted as pleasure, as fulfilment, or as revealed preference. Sen has emphasized the need to take a broader view. As he noted in his paper "Welfare Economics and the Real World", "One of the extraordinary features of standard welfare economics has been the neglect of information about health, morbidity and longevity. Though these variables have often been taken seriously in the development literature ..., they have typically been ignored in welfare-economic treat- ises" [II, 1986b, p. I 1]. His critique of utilitarianism is quite distinct from that of ordinalists, which was concerned with paucity of utility information: "I would now like to dispute the acceptability of welfarism even when utility information is as complete as it can possibly be" [II, 1979, p. 547].

And this:

Without comparability, we cannot make such a statement, but we do not necessarily need full difference comparability in order to arrive at a ranking. Suppose that we are willing to place a limit on the extent of possible variation across people in the scaling of differences: for example, raising or lowering the weight on one person's utility relative to another person's by at most some specified factor. Then we may still be able to claim that the sum of Roman utilities fell, since even the largest possible weight to Nero leaves him outnumbered. Inherent in such an approach is of course the risk that it will leave questions unresolved. Sen has argued that this is not grounds for despair. In his Dewey Lectures [XVI, 1985, p. 178], he examined the alleged need for completeness, and argued tha

Submitted November 12, 2021 at 09:18AM by distant-world https://ift.tt/31XrLD6