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International audience; Under welfarism, assertions such as “this social state is better than an alternative” or “this policy should be enacted” are based on the assumption that social welfare ultimately depends only on the well-being of individuals. A normative analysis of welfarism seeks to provide a transparent description of the basis upon which welfarism makes its value judgments, which is equivalent to an investigation into its choice of a preferred notion of well-being. Such an investigation, this paper claims, can take two forms, which we should distinguish: the ethical analysis of welfarism is concerned with the appeal to a given ethical theory of well-being; and the technical analysis of welfarism concerns the specific measure of individual utility that in practice is used to measure social welfare. Reviewing a series of claims which bear on how these two versions of welfarism are articulated (the standard, proxy, evidential and tension claims), the paper explores the differences between the ethical and technical approaches in the normative interpretation of welfarist assertions.; Dans le cadre d’étude welfariste, des affirmations telles que « cet état social est meilleur que tel autre état social » ou « cette politique devrait être promulguée » reposent sur l’hypothèse que le bien-être social ne dépend que du bien-être des individus et de rien d’autre. Une analyse normative du welfarisme vise à fournir une description transparente des jugements de valeur impliqués dans ces évaluations et ces recommandations, ce qui revient à s’interroger en particulier sur la notion du bien-être qui a été retenue. Cette enquête normative peut prendre deux formes et cet article défend l’idée qu’il convient de les distinguer : l’analyse éthique du welfarisme concerne le recours à une théorie éthique donnée du bien-être ; et l’analyse technique du welfarisme concerne la mesure de l’utilité individuelle qui est utilisée en pratique pour mesurer ce bien-être social. L’article passe en revue successivement quatre points de vue types portant sur l’articulation de ces deux versions du welfarisme : le point de vue standard, de l’approximation, de la preuve et de la tension. En étudiant l’interprétation normative des affirmations welfaristes, il explore les différences qui émergent entre les approches éthique et technique.

International audience; The core idea of utilitarianism for Bentham is to establish that only individual utilities count in social welfare. There can be two distinct interpretations of this apparently simple principle. According to one view, individual utilities represent the basic information for the calculation of social welfare: this is how utilitarianism works. According to a second view, social welfare is maximized if and only if individual utilities are maximized: this is what justifies utilitarianism. This aim of this paper is to show: that these two interpretations should not be confused; that they correspond to distinct definitions of welfarism; that they are likely to conflict; and that as a consequence we can draw important and surprising conclusions for political philosophy and economic science. One such conclusion is that fairness should be prior to goodness in a consistent Benthamian doctrine.