Rawls and Bentham reconciled

The paper deals with the characterization of a class of social welfare orderings. The social evaluation functions which represent these orderings are separable in the components of the ordered utility vector. The characterization is based on the Strong Pareto Property, Co-cardinality, Continuity and a new Independence Property. Since this class encompasses the utilitarian rule and since there are members of this family which almost coincide with the rules of rank dictatorship this family bridges the gap between pure utilitarianism and rank dictatorship.