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While Jevons is well-known for his analysis of pure economics, his contributions to a broader conception of welfare, including a social aspect, has attracted less attention. However, from the standpoint of the history of economic thought, these contributions have a twofold benefit. On the one hand, they reflect how Jevons stuck to utilitarian philosophy; on the other, they bear the marks of nascent welfare economics. Jevons had indeed a particular way of dealing with social welfare as he identified two levels of utility ? the “economic” and the “global” ? the latter being a broader concept and showing clearly that the two might contradict each other. The objective in this paper is to reconstruct the overall architecture of Jevons’s position on social reform. For this purpose, the narrow approach that Jevons believed economists should adopt is presented first. The links that he established between economics and ethics through Bentham’s utilitarian calculus are highlighted. It is then shown how Jevons wanted this viewpoint to be abandoned in the field of legislation, in favor of a method similar to cost-benefit analysis, which mobilized different sciences, to anticipate the outcomes of reforms; after defining this method, the paper examines its consequences, leading Jevons, as an economist, to amend a number of assumptions that he made in the context of pure economics.