  This paper concerns Saez and Stantcheva's (2016) generalized social marginal
welfare weights (GSMWW), which are used to aggregate losses and gains due to
the tax system, while incorporating non-utilitarian ethical considerations.
That approach evaluates local changes in tax policy without appealing to a
global social objective. However, I argue that local comparisons between
different tax systems implicitly entail global comparisons. Moreover, whenever
welfare weights are not of a utilitarian kind, these implied global comparisons
are inconsistent. Part of the motivation for the GSMWW approach is that it
provides a way to incorporate broader ethical judgements into the evaluation of
the tax system while preserving the Pareto principle. I suggest that the
problems with the approach ought to spark a reconsideration of Pareto if one
wants to represent broader values in formal policy analysis.
