 The subject is a topic of normative economics and philosophy and economics.In early welfare economics, where mentioned, 'justice' was little distinguished from maximization of all individual utility functions or a social welfare function.As to the latter, Paul Samuelson (1947), expanding on work of Abram Bergson, represents a social welfare function in general terms as any ethical belief system required to order any (hypothetically feasible) social states for the entire society as "better than", "worse than", or "indifferent to" each other.