The historical tradition of social indicators may be traced back to Jeremy Bentham's (1789) ideas about a felicific calculus that would allow decision makers to calculate the net pleasure or pain connected to everyone affected by an action, with evidence-based public policy choices made to get the greatest net pleasure or least net pain for the greatest number of people. From a consequentialist moral point of view, the aim of government should be to increase the pleasure or happiness, broadly construed, of the maximum number of persons.

This approach is similar to the naturalist tradition in American pragmatism as argued in work by William James (1909), Ralph Barton Perry (1926, 1954), John Dewey (1939), and C. I. Lewis (1946), but more complicated. It is similar in the sense that pragmatism, like Bentham, naturalizes ethics by basing it in subjective preferences. It is more complicated in that most early-twenty-first century social indicators researchers...