Suppose I'm a Kantian, do I want to empower policymakers to maximize the total autonomy of the population? Well no, unless I'm a consequentialist like Cummiskey, typically I'm going to want to empower policymakers to fulfill the goals that have been mandated by the voters. And I'm going to want to manage inflation and unemployment and poverty in accordance with a common-sense conception of social welfare, because I am acting under beneficence, not imposing the good upon others. So the standard economic tools are all contextually appropriate for my actual goals. In a similar manner, a utilitarian social scientist would be perfectly happy to demonstrate that a policy will improve the overall autonomy and dignity of a population, because that does typically improve the population's quality of life; it just happens to be the case that these values are not amenable to fruitful economic analysis.