Highest-quality economic theory on how to do the analysis of societal well-being right, and in the process nest utilitarianism in a broader sensible framework:
Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva (2016): Generalized Social Marginal Welfare Weights for Optimal Tax Theory: "Evaluat[ing] tax reforms by aggregating money-metric losses and gains of different individuals using 'generalized social marginal welfare weights.' Optimum tax formulas take the same form as standard welfarist tax formulas.... Weights directly capture society’s concerns for fairness without being necessarily tied to individual utilities. Suitable weights can help reconcile discrepancies between the welfarist approach and actual tax practice, as well as unify in an operational way the most prominent alternatives to utilitarianism.... There is no social-welfare objective primitive.... Instead, our primitives are generalized social marginal-welfare weights which represent the value that society puts on providing an additional dollar of consumption to any given individual. These weights directly reflect society’s concerns for fairness.... We define a tax system as locally optimal if no small reform is desirable... Slides
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