judge people's decisions by looking at their change in utils and measure whether they are better off. The main forerunner of the utilitarian principles since the end of the 18th century was Jeremy Bentham, who believed utility could be measured by some complex introspective examination and that it should guide the design of social policies and laws. For Bentham a scale of pleasure has as a unit of intensity "the degree of intensity possessed by that pleasure which is the faintest of any that can be distinguished to be pleasure"; he also stated that, as these pleasures increase in intensity higher and higher numbers could represent them. In the 18th and 19th centuries utility's measurability received plenty of attention from European schools of political economy, most notably through the work of marginalists (e.g., William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall). However, neither of them offered solid arguments to support the assumption of measurability. In Jevon's case he added to the later editions of his work a note on the difficulty of estimating utility with accuracy. Walras, too, struggled for many years before he could even attempt to formalize the assumption of measurability. Marshall was ambiguous about the measurability of hedonism because he adhered to its psychological-hedonistic properties but he also argued that it was "unrealistical" to do so. Supporters of cardinal utility theory in the 19th century suggested that market prices reflect utility, although they did not say much about their compatibility (i.e., prices being objective while utility is subjective). Accurately measuring subjective pleasure (or pain) seemed awkward, as the thinkers of the time were surely aware. They renamed utility in imaginative ways such as subjective wealth, overall happiness, moral worth, psychic satisfaction, or ophélimité. During the second half of the 19th century many studies related to this fictional magnitude—utility—were conducted, but the conclusion was always the same: it proved impossible to definitively say whether a good is worth 50, 75, or 125 utils to a person, or to two different people. Moreover, the mere dependence of utility on notions of hedonism led academic circles to be skeptical of this theory. Francis Edgeworth was also aware of the need to ground the theory of utility into the real world. He discussed the quantitative estimates that a person can make of his own pleasure or the pleasure of others, borrowing methods developed in psychology to study hedonic measurement: psychophysics. This field