Jevons did not explicitly distinguish between the concepts of ordinal and cardinal utility.

Economists distinguish between cardinal utility and ordinal utility.

When cardinal utility is used, the magnitude of utility differences is treated as an ethically or behaviorally significant quantity.

It is tempting when dealing with cardinal utility to aggregate utilities across persons.

In the case of cardinal utility it is impossible to measure the level of satisfaction "quantitatively" when someone consumes or purchases an apple.

That is, the aggregate level of welfare in society is given by a welfare function whose arguments are the cardinal utility of income functions.

During the 1940s, Allais became interested in the theory of choice under uncertainty and developed a theory of cardinal utility.

The title of Baumol's paper, "The cardinal utility which is ordinal", expressed well the semantic mess of the literature at the time.

Some authors have commented on the ambiguity of the terms "cardinal utility" and "ordinal utility", as used in economic jargon:

Arrow, like many economists, rejected cardinal utility as a meaningful tool for expressing social welfare, and so focused his theorem on preference rankings.