Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices (...) that violate the unanimous preferences of rational individuals and choices that guarantee worse distributions. These results, I suggest, undermine Buchak’s argument for rank-weighted utilitarianism. (shrink)

1Preface: Malthus the Utilitarian vs. Malthus the Christian moral thinker. The chapter aims at reconstructing the deadlocks of Malthus scholarship concerning his relationship to utilitarianism. It argues that Bonar created out of nothing the myth of Malthus’s ‘Utilitarianism’, which carried, in turn, a pseudo-problem concerning Malthus’s lack of consistency with his own alleged Utilitarianism; besides it argues that such misinterpretation was hard to die and still persists in Hollander’s reading of Malthus’s work. ● -/- 2 Eighteenth-century Anglican (...) ethics. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown worked out a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number of possible sets of laws on the basis of a maximizing criterion, happiness for his creatures. ● -/- 3 Malthus’s meta-ethics. The chapter reconstructs the two ethical chapters of the second Essay. It argues that Malthus’s ethics is not dependent on Paley’s, but is derived from Cumberland, Butler, Gay, Brown. Besides, it argues that theodicy takes a new place in the 1803 Essays and ethics becomes a key to theodicy. The new solution is that, once it has been proved that passions can be mastered and that a world where passions are under control would be a comparatively happy place, a society where moral restraint prevailed would make the middling ranks more numerous, reduce dependence, and preserve liberty. ● -/- 4 Malthus’s early normative ethics: a morality of freedom. The chapter reconstructs young Malthus’s views on the foundations of ethics, proving his adhesion to voluntarist consequentialism. Then it reconstructs his treatment of political issues, whence a clear stance emerges in favour of traditional Whig concerns, such as political freedom, personal independence and dignity. Finally, it gives a fresh look at the theological argument in the two well-known final chapters, locating it in the context of consequentialism, voluntarism, and quasi-Leibnizian theodicy. ● -/- 5 Malthus’s intermediate normative ethics: a morality of prudence. Malthus’s normative ethics focuses on two main ‘natural’ virtues, benevolence and chastity, and three artificial virtues. These include love for equality and love for liberty. A special place is granted to another virtue, prudence, which is the link between natural and artificial virtues. This special virtue also provides an invisible link between the private and the public domains, in that it contributes to combine self-love with general happiness. This is granted by the unintended results mechanism, or “the happiness of the whole is to be the result of the happiness of individuals, and to begin first with them. No cooperation is required”. ● -/- 6 Malthus’s mature normative ethics: a morality of humanity. The chapter describes reactions by Evangelicals, such as Gisborne, Sumner, and Chalmers, to Malthus’s theory and Malthus’s transformation of his own system in order to pave objections. This amounts to incorporating The Evangelicals’ ideas into his own system. The friendly controversy with his Evangelical fellow-travellers yielded several important changes in 1806, 1817, and 1826 editions of the second Essay in the formulation of Malthusian ethics, in the adoption of moral improvement instead of happiness as the variable to be maximised, in the adoption of generalized education as the main weapon in the war on poverty. ● -/- 7 Malthus’s applied ethics. The chapter reconstructs Malthus’s treatment of a few issues in ‘applied ethics’, sexual morality, public morality, poverty, and besides, war and slavery. On the first issue, he argues the duty to marry only at a time when one is ready to carry the burden of six children as a moral duty imposed by prudence and rejects birth control because of its alleged effect of encouraging ‘indolence’. On the second issue, he defends a peculiar kind of Whiggism as anti-Machiavellian politics centred on rights, equality, and dignity. On the third issue, his final approach is a kind of Institutional approach to poverty, making room for generalized basic education, free markets for labour and allowing for a subsidiary role for private beneficence. The goal to be aimed at is bringing about circumstances which tend to elevate the character of the lower classes of society and offer them a chance of being respectable, virtuous and happy. ● -/- 8 Conclusions: strengthening the theological foundation. Malthus’s criteria for policy appraisal were not utilitarian ones. His normative ethics and his politics were sharply different from Bentham’s. Utility is just one element in Malthus’s ethics, going with laws of nature and rights, and ironically, far from being a Benthamite insertion, is the most markedly theological element in Malthus’s system of ideas. ● -/- . (shrink)

Lara Buchak argues that her version of rank-weighted utilitarianism can accommodate an implication of the separateness of persons known as “the shift,” since it requires individuals to be more willing to accept risk for themselves than to accept inequality in society. I argue that this is mistaken. Buchak’s model fails to yield the shift when the decision-maker is distinct from the affected individual, as well as in certain social decisions where the risk attitude of the group is (...) known. These findings suggest that models which derive social choice rules from individual decision rules will generally fail to uphold separateness. (shrink)

Many people believe that we have responsibility towards the distant future, but exactly how far this responsibility reaches and how we can find a reasonable ethical foundation for it has not been answered in any definitive manner. Future people have no power over us, they form no part of our moral community and it is unclear how we can represent them in a possible original position. All these problems can be circumvented when you take an impersonal decision criterion like maximizing (...) total or average utility. Such a sum-ranking criterion is neutral with respect to distance in time or space: my utility, my neighbour's and that of our descendants all carry the same weight. This makes future people an integral part of present decisions. Time-neutrality was defended by, among others, Sidgwick, Pigou and Ramsey. (shrink)

Lara Buchak defends a Weight-Ranked Utilitarianism (WRU) that she says avoids the critique of Rawls’s that is sometimes thought fatal: utilitarianism unjustifiably blurs the distinction between persons. Buchak’s defence depends upon (i) a version of Harsanyi’s assumption that parties to a social contract should reason as if they have an equal chance of being anyone and (ii) a hypothesis she explores in a recent article. I argue that her assumption and hypothesis are untenable. WRU fails of the generality (...) to which Buchak aspires because it fails for one of her most important cases: the distributive question posed by Rawls. (shrink)

We develop a model of Disappointment in which disappointment and elation arise from comparing the outcome received, not with an expected value as in previous models, but rather with the other individual outcomes of the lottery. This approach may better reflect the way individuals are liable to experience disappointment. The model obtained accounts for classic behavioral deviations from the normative theory, offers a richer structure than previous disappointment models, and leads to a Rank-Dependent Utility formulation in a transparent way. (...) Thus, our disappointment model may provide a clear psychological rationale for the subjective transformation of probabilities. (shrink)

We give two social aggregation theorems under conditions of risk, one for constant population cases, the other an extension to variable populations. Intra and interpersonal welfare comparisons are encoded in a single ‘individual preorder’. The theorems give axioms that uniquely determine a social preorder in terms of this individual preorder. The social preorders described by these theorems have features that may be considered characteristic of Harsanyi-style utilitarianism, such as indifference to ex ante and ex post equality. However, the theorems (...) are also consistent with the rejection of all of the expected utility axioms, completeness, continuity, and independence, at both the individual and social levels. In that sense, expected utility is inessential to Harsanyi-style utilitarianism. In fact, the variable population theorem imposes only a mild constraint on the individual preorder, while the constant population theorem imposes no constraint at all. We then derive further results under the assumption of our basic axioms. First, the individual preorder satisfies the main expected utility axiom of strong independence if and only if the social preorder has a vector-valued expected total utility representation, covering Harsanyi’s utilitarian theorem as a special case. Second, stronger utilitarian-friendly assumptions, like Pareto or strong separability, are essentially equivalent to strong independence. Third, if the individual preorder satisfies a ‘local expected utility’ condition popular in non-expected utility theory, then the social preorder has a ‘local expected total utility’ representation. Fourth, a wide range of non-expected utility theories nevertheless lead to social preorders of outcomes that have been seen as canonically egalitarian, such as rank-dependent social preorders. Although our aggregation theorems are stated under conditions of risk, they are valid in more general frameworks for representing uncertainty or ambiguity. (shrink)

Dual-ranking act-consequentialism (DRAC) is a rather peculiar version of act-consequentialism. Unlike more traditional forms of act-consequentialism, DRAC doesn’t take the deontic status of an action to be a function of some evaluative ranking of outcomes. Rather, it takes the deontic status of an action to be a function of some non-evaluative ranking that is in turn a function of two auxiliary rankings that are evaluative. I argue that DRAC is promising in that it can accommodate certain features of commonsense morality (...) that no single-ranking version of act-consequentialism can: supererogation, agent-centered options, and the self-other asymmetry. I also defend DRAC against three objections: (1) that its dual-ranking structure is ad hoc, (2) that it denies (putatively implausibly) that it is always permissible to make self-sacrifices that don’t make things worse for others, and (3) that it violates certain axioms of expected utility theory, viz., transitivity and independence. (shrink)

We address the question of how finitely additive moral value theories (such as utilitarianism) should rank worlds when there are an infinite number of locations of value (people, times, etc.). In the finite case, finitely additive theories satisfy both Weak Pareto and a strong anonymity condition. In the infinite case, however, these two conditions are incompatible, and thus a question arises as to which of these two conditions should be rejected. In a recent contribution, Hamkins and Montero (2000) (...) have argued in favor of an anonymity-like isomorphism principle and against Weak Pareto. After casting doubt on their criticism of Weak Pareto, we show how it, in combination with certain other plausible principles, generates a plausible and fairly strong principle for the infinite case. We further show that where locations are the same in all worlds, but have no natural order, this principle turns out to be equivalent to a strengthening of a principle defended by Vallentyne and Kagan (1997), and also to a weakened version of the catching-up criterion developed by Atsumi (1965) and by von Weizsäcker (1965). Footnotes1 For valuable comments, we would like to thank Marc Fleurbaey, Bart Capéau, Joel Hamkins, Barbara Montero, Tim Mulgan, and two anonymous referees for this journal. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Average utilitarianism and several related axiologies, when paired with the standard expectational theory of decision-making under risk and with reasonable empirical credences, can find their practical prescriptions overwhelmingly determined by the minuscule probability that the agent assigns to solipsism—that is, to the hypothesis that there is only one welfare subject in the world, namely, herself. This either (i) constitutes a reductio of these axiologies, (ii) suggests that they require bespoke decision theories, or (iii) furnishes an unexpected argument for (...) ethical egoism. (shrink)

Harmonic Grammar (HG) and Optimality Theory (OT) are closely related formal frameworks for the study of language. In both, the structure of a given language is determined by the relative strengths of a set of constraints. They differ in how these strengths are represented: as numerical weights (HG) or as ranks (OT). Weighted constraints have advantages for the construction of accounts of language learning and other cognitive processes, partly because they allow for the adaptation of connectionist and statistical models. (...) HG has been little studied in generative linguistics, however, largely due to influential claims that weighted constraints make incorrect predictions about the typology of natural languages, predictions that are not shared by the more popular OT. This paper makes the case that HG is in fact a promising framework for typological research, and reviews and extends the existing arguments for weighted over ranked constraints. (shrink)

Economic policy evaluations require social welfare functions for variable-size populations. Two important candidates are critical-level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU) and rank-discounted critical-level generalized utilitarianism, which was recently characterized by Asheim and Zuber (2014) (AZ). AZ introduce a novel axiom, existence of egalitarian equivalence (EEE). First, we show that, under some uncontroversial criteria for a plausible social welfare relation, EEE suffices to rule out the Repugnant Conclusion of population ethics (without AZ’s other novel axioms). Second, we provide a new (...) characterization of CLGU: AZ’s set of axioms is equivalent to CLGU when EEE is replaced by the axiom same-number independence. (shrink)

Is Utilitarianism Bad for Women? Philosophers and policy-makers concerned with the ethics, economics, and politics of development argue that the phenomenon of ‘adaptive preference’ makes preference-utilitarian measures of well-being untenable. Poor women in the Global South, they suggest, adapt to deprivation and oppression and may come to prefer states of affairs that are not conducive to flourishing. This critique, however, assumes a questionable understanding of preference utilitarianism and, more fundamentally, of the concept of preference that figures in such (...) accounts. If well-being is understood as preference-satisfaction it is easy to see why poor women in the Global South are badly off: even if they do not desire more favorable conditions they nevertheless prefer them, and that preference is not satisfied. Preferentism provides a rationale for improving economic conditions and dismantling the unjust institutions that prevent them from climbing higher on their preference-rankings. Utilitarianism, therefore, insofar as utility is understood as preference satisfaction, is good for women. (shrink)

It has been argued that evolutionary considerations favour utilitarianism by selectively debunking its competitors. However, evolutionary considerations also seem to undermine the practical significance of utilitarianism, since commonsense beliefs about well-being seem like prime candidates for evolutionary debunking. We argue that the practical significance of utilitarianism is not undermined in this way if we understand the requirements of practical rationality as sensitive to normative uncertainty. We consider the view that rational decision-making under normative uncertainty requires maximizing expected (...) choice-worthiness, as well as the possibility that different theories’ choice-worthiness rankings are not all interval-scale measurable or intertheoretically comparable. Finally, we suggest how evolutionary considerations may increase the practical significance of utilitarianism even if belief in utilitarianism is debunked by evolutionary considerations, so long as belief in competing theories is undermined to an even greater extent. (shrink)

Richard Brandt is one of the most eminent and influential of contemporary moral philosophers. His work has been concerned with how to justify what is good or right not by reliance on intuitions or theories about what moral words mean but by the explanation of moral psychology and the description of what it is to value something, or to think it immoral. His approach thus stands in marked contrast to the influential theories of John Rawls. The essays reprinted in this (...) collection span a period of almost 30 years and include many classic pieces in metaethical and normative ethical theory. The collection is aimed at both those moral philosophers familiar with Brandt's work and at those philosophers who may be largely unfamiliar with his work. The latter group will be struck by the lucid unpretentious style and the cumulative weight of Brandt's contributions to topics that remain at the forefront of moral philosophy. (shrink)

Personal utilitarianism applies act-utilitarianism to the problem of individual choice. It is based on the view that the good life is achieved through maximizing the sum of individual measures of utility over a population. the population being the sequence of semi-autonomous selves from which the individual is composed. I begin by showing how our lives can usefully be partitioned into selves because the weights put on our various choice motives are constantly changing and, consequently, our preferences themselves concerning (...) what we should choose at any given time can also change from moment-to-moment. In particular, because we put disproportionate weight on our present needs relative to our future ones, we often become impatient and choose options that offer immediate gratification. I use concepts from game theory to describe multiple selves, and to discuss how strategic interactions between selves are possible, and then conclude by considering the practical problem of how to achieve the good life, or how can we get our selves to choose what is best for us in the long run. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has frequently been criticized for lacking psychological realism, but what this means and why it is thought to matter varies. This article distinguishes and examines three main relevant kinds of appeals to psychological realism: (a) A minimalist, self-avowedly metaethically neutral and empirically based ‘ought implies can’ approach, exemplified by Owen Flanagan. (b) Arguments from psychological costs and flourishing, exemplified by Michael Stocker and Bernard Williams. (c) ‘Thick’ psychological realism, exemplified by Elizabeth Anscombe, where a conception of human nature (...) does not simply provide constraints on value theory, but forms the substantive basis on which it builds. The main challenge raised for utilitarianism turns out to be metaethical, not a matter of empirical psychology. The question is not so much whether utilitarianism can accommodate (putative) descriptive facts of human psychology as such, but what normative weight these facts should be given and why. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] Copyright of Utilitas is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to alls.). (shrink)

This chapter offers a concise discussion of classic utilitarianism which is the prototypical moral doctrine of the utilitarian family. It starts with an analysis of the classic utilitarian criterion of rightness, gives an overview over its virtues and vices, and suggests an overall assessment of its adequacy as a theory of morality. Furthermore, it briefly discusses whether classic utilitarianism holds promise as a philosophy for doing business.

This article presents a rule-utilitarian theory which lies much closer to the social contract tradition than most other forms of consequentialism do: calculated-rates rule preference utilitarianism. Being preference-utilitarian allows the theory to be grounded in instrumental rationality and the equality of agents, as opposed to teleological assumptions about impartial goodness. The calculated-rates approach, judging rules’ consequences by what would happen if they were accepted by whatever number of people is realistic rather than by what would happen if they were (...) accepted universally or by exactly 90% of the population, allows it to select rules based not just on their ability to give good advice to their followers but also on their ability to attract followers in the first place. The result is a theory that, although fully utilitarian and not at all pluralistic or intuitionist, nevertheless offers a principled justification for giving some weight to seemingly non-utilitarian considerations: Lockean natural rights, Kantian respect for autonomy, and Scanlonian distributive justice. (shrink)

Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ :287–309, 1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is (...) an equal probability of becoming each person. For a potentially infinite population facing an exogenous stochastic process of extinction, an equitable extinction biased original position requires equal conditional probabilities, given that the individual’s generation survives the extinction process. Such a position is well-defined if and only if survival probabilities decline fast enough for the expected total number of individuals who can ever live to be finite. Then, provided that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, maximizing expected “extinction discounted” total utility—as advocated, inter alia, by the Stern Review on climate change—provides a coherent and dynamically consistent equitable objective, even when the population size of each generation can be chosen. (shrink)

This paper works within a particular framework for reasoning about actions—sometimes known as the framework of “stit semantics”—originally due to Belnap and Perloff, based ultimately on the theory of indeterminism set out in Prior’s indeterministic tense logic, and developed in full detail by Belnap, Perloff, and Xu [3]. The issues I want to consider arise when certain normative, or decision theoretic, notions are introduced into this framework: here I will focus on the notion of a right action, and so on (...) the formulation of act utilitarianism within this indeterministic setting. The problem is simply that there are two different, and conflicting, ways of defining this notion, both well-motivated, and both carrying intuitive weight. (shrink)

While much attention has been given to the use of principles in biomedical ethics and increasing attention is given to alternative theoretical approaches, relatively little attention has been devoted to the critical task of how one resolves conflicts among competing principles. After summarizing the system of principles and some problems in conceptualizing the principles, several strategies for reconciling conflicts among principles are examined including the use of single-principle theories (pure libertarianism, pure utilitarianism, and pure Hippocratism), balancing theories, conflicting appeals (...) theories, and lexical ordering. Then a mixed strategy is proposed in which consequentialist principles are balanced between themselves as are nonconsequentialist principles, after which the result of balancing the nonconsequentialist principles is lexically ranked over the result of balancing the consequentialist ones. Finally, strategies involving specifying and rule generation are discussed concluding that most current specification and rule-generating theories must involve some degree of lexical ordering of principles. (shrink)

RULE or restricted utilitarianism is frequently propounded and just as frequently criticized in the literature. Its various refinements initially involve conceptual adjustments such as clarifying the logical relations between some stateable rule of utility and other moral rules or the specification of a criterion for ranking rules in case of conflict and so forth. It soon becomes clear, comparatively speaking, that a cluster of problems involving justice, personal rights and the denotation of ‘intrinsic good’ cannot be resolved without extending (...) rule utilitarianism as a theory of right conduct and justification; thus the origin of the appellation ‘extended’ rule utilitarianism. In this paper I shall: render an interpreted model of rule utilitarianism that possesses all the logical features of alternative interpretations. Describe a style of argument for extending rule utilitarianism to incorporate a rule of distribution. Such an extension preserves the consistency of rule utilitarianism. Describe a second style of argument for extending rule utilitarianism to incorporate a rule of distribution. Such an extension does not preserve the consistency of rule utilitarianism. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed a surge in philosophical attention to the moral standing of non-human animals. Kantians, Neo-Kantians, utilitarians, and radical animal rights theorists have staked their claims in the literature. Here Fred Feldman’s desert-adjusted utilitarianism is introduced into the fray. After canvassing the prominent competitors in the dialectic, a conception of an overall moral ranking consonant with desert-adjusted utilitarianism is developed. Then the conception’s implications regarding the particular locations of individual people and animals in such rankings across (...) various scenarios is explored. Ultimately, it is argued that when it comes to evaluating whether or not some benefit morally ought to be bestowed upon some specific person or animal, this new conception of an overall moral ranking is sensitive to a wider range of morally relevant phenomena than its more prominent competitors. (shrink)

Recent research indicates that there is a gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor. This raises the question: should we on egalitarian grounds use income-based equity weights when we assess benefits of alternative benevolent interventions, so that health benefits to the poor count for more? This article provides three egalitarian arguments for using income-based equity weights under certain circumstances. If income inequality correlates with inequality in health, we have reason to use income-based equity weights on the ground (...) that health inequality is bad. If income inequality correlates with inequality in opportunity for health, we have reason to use such weights on the ground that inequality in opportunity for health is bad. If income inequality correlates with inequality in well-being, income-based equity weights should be used to mitigate inequality in well-being. Three different ways in which to construe income-based equity weights are introduced and discussed. They can be based on relative income inequality, on income rankings and on capped absolute income. The article does not defend any of these types of weighting schemes, but argues that in order to settle which of these types of weighting scheme to choose, more empirical research is needed. (shrink)

It has long been argued, and often admitted, that utilitarianism cannot account for distributive Justice. The purpose of this paper is to show that utilitarianism cannot make sense of the moral issues involved in having children. In particular, it cannot take account of the differences between infanticide, abortion, contraception and chastity. Importantly, the two difficulties stem from a common feature of utilitarianism, that since it is a sum-ranking decision procedure, it is structurally indifferent to who experiences utility. (...) Children and Justice are two cases where it makes every difference how the utility total is distributed among people. (shrink)

Background Escalating levels of obesity place enormous and growing demands on Health care provision in the (U.K.) United Kingdom. Resources are limited with increasing and competing demands upon them. Ethical considerations underpin clinical decision making generally, but there is limited evidence regarding the relationship between these variables particularly in terms of treating individuals with obesity. Research aim To investigate the views of National Health Service (NHS) clinicians on navigating the ethical challenges and decision making associated with obesity management in adults (...) with chronic illness. Research design A cross-sectional, multi-site survey distributed electronically. Participants A consensus sample of nurses, doctors, dietitians and final year students in two NHS Trusts and two Universities. Ethical considerations Ethical and governance approvals obtained from a National Ethics Committee (11NIR035), two universities and two teaching hospitals. Results Of the total ( n = 395) participants, the majority were nurses (48%), female (79%) and qualified clinicians (59%). Participants strongly considered the individual to have primary responsibility for a healthy weight and an obligation to attempt to maintain that healthy weight if they wish to access NHS care. Yet two thirds would not withhold treatment for patients with obesity. Discussion While clinicians were clear about patient responsibility and obligations, the majority prioritised their duty of care and would not invoke a utilitarian approach to decision making. This may reflect awareness of obesity as a multi-faceted entity, with responsibility for support and management shared amongst society in general. Conclusions The attitudes of this sample of clinicians complemented the concept of the health service as being built on a principle of community, with each treated according to their need. However limited resources challenge the concept of needs-based decisions consequently societal engagement is necessary to agree a pragmatic way forward. (shrink)

My dissertation focuses on problems that arise when a group makes decisions that are in reasonable ways connected to the beliefs and values of the group members. These situations are represented by models of decision-theoretic aggregation: Suppose a model of individual rationality in decision-making applies to each of a group of agents. Suppose this model also applies to the group as a whole, and that this group model is aggregated from the individual models. Two questions arise. First, what sets of (...) reasonable conditions can we consistently impose on the aggregation? Second, what can we learn from insights gained in such models, in particular for ethics and political philosophy? The dissertation has three parts, each using a different model of individual rationality. Each part contains essays addressing questions of either the first or the second kind with regard to its underlying model. Part I uses a social-choice-theoretic model, in which agents are only assumed to rank alternatives. Arrow's "Impossibility Theorem" shows that certain conditions that it would be natural to impose on all aggregation cannot be so imposed, on pain of contradiction. I discuss the impact of this result on the evaluation of majority rule and on democratic theory. I also discuss Sen's "Liberal Paradox", which addresses the possibility of incorporating rights into a social-choice theoretic model. Part II uses the von Neumann/Morgenstern theory of expected utility. A result under this model has been regarded as providing an argument for utilitarianism. I locate a place within utilitarianism where the theorem can do some work. To prepare the ground, I interpret the von Neumann/Morgenstern theory as part of a theory of deliberation. Thereby, this version of expected utility theory can be embedded into the philosophy of practical reasoning. The underlying model in Part III is Bayesian decision theory. Whereas the other two inquiries focus on the philosophical assessment of formal results, the third makes a formal contribution. One essay surveys the area, and a second explores a curious phenomenon that occurs in determining outcomes under one type of Bayesian aggregation. (shrink)

Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term (...) survival of humanity over the interests of the present generation. Non-additive axiologies, on the other hand, need not assign great importance to large changes in population size. We show, however, that when there is a large enough `background population' unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with additive axiologies—for instance, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from the scale of potential future populations for the astronomical importance of avoiding existential catastrophe, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may succeed in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle. (shrink)

Ethics is demanding by nature, telling us what we should or should not do. But one ethical theory in particular, utilitarianism, is more demanding than most, and is often criticized as requiring too much of us. Neither utilitarianism nor deontology requires Superman to care about truth, justice, or the American way. It might not be possible for Superman to be supererogatory since very little is above or beyond the call of duty for him, given our incredibly high expectations. (...) Virtue ethics has the best chance to explain how Superman can perform supererogatory acts, since it doesn't focus on good action as such, but rather good character. While people use the name “big blue boy scout” in a derogatory way with Superman, it is a nice way to capture an ethical theory that might grant Superman’s responsibilities while allowing him a chance to live his own life: virtue ethics. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts are, in some sense, morally better their non-supererogatory alternatives. In this sense, what is it for one option A to be better than an alternative B? I argue for three main conclusions. First, relative rankings are a type of all-in action guidance. If A is better than B, then morality recommends that you A rather than B. Such all-in guidance is useful when acts have the same deontic status. Second, I argue that Right > Wrong: permissible acts are (...) always better than their impermissible alternatives. If Right > Wrong were false, then morality’s deontic verdicts would sometimes conflict with its relative rankings. Such conflict would undermine the thought that morality is a coherent, authoritative guide to action. Third, the All or Nothing Problem is not a counterexample to Right > Wrong as is commonly thought. Instead, it involves an interesting ranking reversal: whether A > B can depend on whether a certain alternative is added as a third option. (shrink)

1.1 In 1955, John Harsanyi proved a remarkable theorem:1 Suppose n agents satisfy the assumptions of von Neumann/Morgenstern (1947) expected utility theory, and so does the group as a whole (or an observer). Suppose that, if each member of the group prefers option a to b, then so does the group, or the observer (Pareto condition). Then the group’s utility function is a weighted sum of the individual utility functions. Despite Harsanyi’s insistence that what he calls the Utilitarian Theorem (...) embeds utilitarianism into a theory of rationality, the theorem has fallen short of having the kind of impact on the discussion of utilitarianism for which Harsanyi hoped. Yet how could the theorem influence this discussion? Utilitarianism is as attractive to some as it is appalling to others. The prospects for this dispute to be affected by a theorem seem dim. Yet a closer look shows how the theorem could make a contribution. To fix ideas, I understand by utilitarianism the following claims: (1) Consequentialism: Actions are evaluated in terms of their consequences only. (2) Bayesianism: An agent's beliefs about possible outcomes are captured probabilistically. (3) Welfarism: The judgement of the relative goodness of states of affairs is based.. (shrink)

This is Chapter 5 of my Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality. In this chapter, I argue that those who wish to accommodate typical instances of supererogation and agent-centered options must deny that moral reasons are morally overriding and accept both that the reason that agents have to promote their own self-interest is a non-moral reason and that this reason can, and sometimes does, prevent the moral reason that they have to sacrifice their self-interest so as to do more to (...) promote the interests of others from generating a moral requirement. Furthermore, I argue that given that an act’s deontic status of both moral and non-moral reasons, the consequentialist must adopt dual-ranking act-consequentialism. I then defend dual-ranking act-consequentialism against a number of objections. (shrink)

Many welfarists wish to assign to each possible state of the world a numerical value that measures something like its moral goodness. How are we to determine this quantity? This paper proposes a contractualist approach: a legitimate measure of moral goodness is one that could be justified to each member of the population in question. How do we justify a measure of moral goodness to each individual? Each individual recognises the measure of moral goodness must be a compromise between the (...) different levels of well-being within the population. Some compromises are more reasonable than others; and some are better justifiable to a given member of the population than others. Each member recognises that the social chooser's measure of moral goodness is going to have to deviate from the well-being function of at least some of the members of the population. But we can nonetheless justify it to each of them if it doesn't deviate more than is necessary, and if the deviations from each member are given equal weighting in whatever process we use to determine it. This paper proposes that we begin with a measure of the distance from a proposed compromise to an individual's level of well-being, and then say that the moral goodness is the candidate compromise that minimizes the sum of distances from it to the individuals' levels of well-being. I describe a range of such measures of distance and show that some give utilitarianism, others different versions of prioritarianism. (shrink)

Many people believe that animals possess moral status, but human beings possess higher moral status than animals. To try to identify a theoretical basis for this view, Robert Nozick proposed Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People. The present manuscript evaluates Nozick’s proposal by identifying the tradeoffs in welfare that it permits in medical research with animals and assessing whether those tradeoffs are indeed permissible. This analysis suggests that at least some deontological side constraints apply to the treatment of sentient (...) animals, hence, Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People is mistaken. Because Nozick’s proposal represents a prominent attempt to provide a theoretical basis for the common belief that human beings possess higher moral status than animals, this conclusion is noteworthy in its own right. Moreover, by granting equal moral weight to the interests of animals, but reserving deontological side constraints for human beings, Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People offers one of the more plausible bases for the claim that there are degrees of moral status among those who matter morally. The manuscript thus ends by considering the implications of the present analysis for the possibility that moral status comes in degrees. (shrink)

A detailed theoretical analysis is presented of what five utility representations – subjective expected utility (SEU), rank-dependent (cumulative or Choquet) utility (RDU), gains decomposition utility (GDU), rank weighted utility (RWU), and a configural-weight model (TAX) that we show to be equivalent to RWU – say about a series of independence properties, many of which were suggested by M. H. Birnbaum and his coauthors. The goal is to clarify what implications to draw about the descriptive aspects of the (...) representations from data concerning these properties. The upshot is a sharp rejection of SEU and RDU and no clear choice between GDU and TAX, but a list of 8 properties is given that should receive more attention to discriminate between the latter two models. (shrink)

Utilitarians and their critics commonly assume that maximizing utilitarianism necessarily aggregates over cardinal comparable personal utility rankings that are homogeneous in quality independently of their sources or objects, whether utility is conceived in terms of pleasure or preference satisfaction. Although familiar versions of utilitarianism, crude or sophisticated, do make such rich homogeneous utility information part of the very meaning of the doctrine, utilitarian philosophy loses credibility as a result. A more credible version of maximizing utilitarianism along John (...) Stuart Mill's lines relies instead on plural kinds of ordinal non-comparable personal utilities that are heterogeneous in quality. One kind of utility is qualitatively superior to another if and only if the higher kind is more valuable than the lower kind irrespective of quantity. Given that the kind of utility associated with the moral sentiment of justice is qualitatively superior to any competing kinds, Mill's pluralistic ordinal utilitarianism gives absolute priority to a social code of equal rights and duties over competing considerations. Some key practical implications of this extraordinary utilitarianism are discussed with reference to various examples of the sort discussed in the literature. (shrink)

Elicitation methods in decision-making under risk allow us to infer the utilities of outcomes as well as the probability weights from the observed preferences of an individual. An optimally efficient elicitation method is proposed, which takes the inevitable distortion of preferences by random errors into account and minimizes the effect of such errors on the inferred utility and probability weighting functions. Under mild assumptions, the optimally efficient method for eliciting utilities and probability weights is the following three-stage procedure. First, a (...) probability is elicited whose subjective weight is one half. Second, the utility function is elicited through the midpoint chaining certainty equivalent method using the probability elicited at the first stage. Finally, the probability weighting function is elicited through the probability equivalent method. (shrink)

Empirical evidence from both utility and psychophysical experiments suggests that people respond quite differently—perhaps discontinuously—to stimulus pairs when one consequence or signal is set to `zero.' Such stimuli are called unitary. The author's earlier theories assumed otherwise. In particular, the key property of segregation relating gambles and joint receipts (or presentations) involves unitary stimuli. Also, the representation of unitary stimuli was assumed to be separable (i.e., multiplicative). The theories developed here do not invoke separability. Four general cases based on two (...) distinctions are explored. The first distinction is between commutative joint receipts, which are relevant to utility, and the non-commutative ones, which are relevant to psychophysics. The second distinction concerns how stimuli of the form (x, C; y) and the operation of joint receipt are linked: by segregation, which mixes stimuli and unitary ones, and by distributivity, which does not involve any unitary stimuli. A class of representations more general than rank-dependent utility (RDU) is found in which monotonic functions of increments U(x)-U(y), where U is an order preseving representation of gambles, and joint receipt play a role. This form and its natural generalization to gambles with n > 2 consequences, which is also axiomatized, appear to encompass models of configural weights and decision affect. When joint receipts are not commutative, somewhat similar representations of stimuli arise, and joint receipts are shown to have a conjoint additive representation and in some cases a constant bias independent of signal intensity is predicted. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the goal of finding influential legal precedents by quantitative methods. A lot of work has been made in this direction worldwide, especially in the context of common law jurisdictions. However, this type of work is extremely scarce in the Brazilian literature. In addition, our work also contributes to the research of network analysis and the law by applying these methods to unprecedented amount of data and narrowing our inquiry to a single law area, corporate (...) law. Furthermore, whereas most of the literature applying network analysis to judicial decisions had access to readily available data on the citations to precedent within each ruling, our raw data was nothing but the full text of decisions. We focus on data produced by the Superior Court of Justice, the highest court in Brazil for matters of federal law, including statutory interpretation of civil, criminal and corporate law. The Court issued an astonishing 282040 opinions tagged as related to corporate law between 2008 and 2018. This amount of cases is unparalleled internationally for superior courts and for studies in network analysis and law. In our results, we rank precedents quantitatively based on the citations they receive and make. We also qualitatively analyze some of the results, especially related to groups identified in the network with the Modularity algorithm. Our findings also reveal that corporate law jurisprudence in the STJ is quantitatively dominated by a few legal issues around one single theme that is only tangentially related to corporate law. That is, a type of contract used for the expansion of telephone landlines, which also allowed the consumer to become a shareholder of the telecommunication company. This comparison is especially pertinent because the utter lack of data on the quantitative weight of STJ precedents means the national literature has been operating in a void of objective measurements, one which has been filled with cherry-picked rulings and subjective ranking criteria. (shrink)

With the wide adoption of social collaborative coding, more and more developers participate and collaborate on platforms such as GitHub through rich social and technical relationships, forming a large-scale complex technical system. Like the functionalities of critical nodes in other complex systems, influential developers and projects usually play an important role in driving this technical system to more optimized states with higher efficiency for software development, which makes it a meaningful research direction on identifying influential developers and projects in social (...) collaborative coding platforms. However, traditional ranking methods seldom take into account the continuous interactions and the driving forces of human dynamics. In this paper, we combine the bursty interactions and the bipartite network structure between developers and projects and propose the BurstBiRank model. Firstly, the burstiness between each pair of developers and projects is calculated. Secondly, a weighted developer-project bipartite network is constructed using the burstiness as weight. Finally, an iterative score diffusion process is applied to this bipartite network and a final ranking score is obtained at the stationary state. The real-world case study on GitHub demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed BurstBiRank and the outperformance of traditional ranking methods. (shrink)

This paper proposes the CorpRank algorithm to extract social hierarchies from electronic communication data. The algorithm computes a ranking score for each user as a weighted combination of the number of emails, the number of responses, average response time, clique scores, and several degree and centrality measures. The algorithm uses principal component analysis to calculate the weights of the features. This score ranks users according to their importance, and its output is used to reconstruct an organization chart. We illustrate (...) the algorithm over real-world data using the Enron corporation’s e-mail archive. Compared to the actual corporate work chart, compensation lists, judicial proceedings, and analyzing the major players involved, the results show promise. (shrink)

Scoring rules constitute a particularly popular technique for aggregating a set of rankings. However, setting the weights associated with rank positions is a crucial task, as different instantiations of the weights can often lead to different winners. In this work we adopt minimax regret as a robust criterion for determining the winner in the presence of uncertainty over the weights. Focusing on two general settings we provide a characterization of the minimax regret rule in terms of cumulative ranks, allowing (...) a quick computation of the winner. We then analyze the properties of using minimax regret as a social choice function. Finally we provide some test cases of rank aggregation using the proposed method. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plotinus and the Augustine on the Mid-Rank of the Soul: Navigating Two Worlds by Joseph TorchiaThomas ClemmonsTORCHIA, Joseph. Plotinus and the Augustine on the Mid-Rank of the Soul: Navigating Two Worlds. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2023. vii + 237 pp. Cloth, $105.00For nearly four decades, Joseph Torchia, O.P., has written extensively on Augustine and Plotinus. He has produced numerous scholarly articles on both Augustine and Plotinus, (...) as well as monographs on Augustine’s understanding of creatio ex nihilo and tolma in Plotinus. This volume on the mid-rank of the soul in Plotinus and Augustine is the fruit of this life-long study.The major premise of Torchia’s study is the profound relation, even continuity, between Hellenistic philosophy, especially Neoplatonism, and early Christian thought. The Hellenistic view of an ordered universe, which extends from the material and physical to the spiritual and noetic, [End Page 730] places the human in a middle place. This view is exposited most clearly by Plotinus and shared, though with qualifications, by early Christians, especially St. Augustine. Torchia asserts that we are able to see this shared legacy and continuity between philosophers such as Plotinus and Augustine in “their respective anthropological and psychological theories.”The book is divided into halves; the first on Plotinus and the second on Augustine. Torchia’s discussion of Plotinus’s philosophy narrows and deepens through five chapters, from a general outline of the Alexandrian’s system to a heightened focus on the journey of the soul, as imaged through the figure of Odysseus. Torchia rightly notes the inconsistent depiction of the descent of soul(s), especially of individual souls as both in a sense “fallen” and “sent.” This tension is in part resolved through Plotinus’s emphasis on the middle place of the soul and the harmony of all the parts within the unity of the whole.The chapters on Plotinus are excellent. Torchia shows how Plotinus integrates concepts from Aristotle, especially his De anima, and qualifies the spiritualized philosophy of Plato. What we get, then, is Plotinus as a highly original philosopher, whose insights deserve closer examination. For example, Torchia glosses the Plotinian dictum, “we are soul,” to examine what is meant by “we” and “soul.” Far from leading to a dismissive view of the body and individuality (as is often stated about Plotinus), Torchia emphasizes that the middle state of the soul is the condition of soul. The lower soul, or the composite (per Torchia), cannot be simply lopped off. To do so, the unity of soul would be destroyed. Torchia thus presents a Plotinus profoundly concerned with humanity in its entirety—our affections, body, thoughts, and individuality. This is why Plotinus and Torchia land on the image of Odysseus as the journeyman to depict human existence.In the final five chapters, the book turns exclusively to Augustine. Torchia outlines the profound difference between Augustine and Plotinus as regards the ontological distinction between God as creator and the human. Because of this distinction, Torchia observes that the mid-rank of the soul takes on a more profound “existential significance.” This existential significance is witnessed in Augustine’s emphasis on free will and the “weight of love,” which, according to Torchia, shows affinities with Plotinus but also departs from the determinism and necessity of the descent of soul(s) in the Alexandrian’s system.The final chapter of the book examines Augustine’s understanding of the two cities, of God and of man. Torchia asserts that the middle-rank of the soul provides the philosophical undercurrent to Augustine’s conception of the City of God. The City of God is not exclusively a spiritual reality. Rather, much as with the middle-rank of the soul, the City of God is both “here” and “there.” The permixta of the Church as an intermediate state is “analogous to the mid-rank status of the rational soul.” For Augustine, both the individual and the Church journey, like Plotinus’s Odysseus, on the stormy seas. [End Page 731]In this book, Torchia has provided a thorough and insightful reading of Plotinus. He highlights the inherent rational optimism of Plotinus as well as the goodness... (shrink)

The construction industry consistently ranks amongst the highest contributors to global gross domestic product, as well as, amongst the most corrupt. Corruption therefore inflicts significant risk on construction activities, and overall economic development. These facts are widely known, but the various sources and nature of corruption risks endemic to the Iranian construction industry, along with the degree to which such risks manifest, and the strength of their impact, remain undescribed. To address the gap, a mixed methods approach is used; with (...) a questionnaire, 103 responses were received, and these were followed up with semi-structured interviews. Results were processed using social network analysis. Four major corruption risks were identified: procedural violations in awarding contracts, misuse of contractual arrangements, neglect of project management principles, and, irrational decision making. While corruption risks in Iran align with those found in other countries, with funds being misappropriated for financial gain, Iran also shows a strong inclination to champion projects that serve the government’s political agenda. Root cause identification of corruption risks, namely, the noticeable impact of authoritarianism on project selection in Iran, over criterion of economic benefit or social good, is a significant outcome of this study. (shrink)

Abstract Normative criteria for evaluations of economic and social outcomes are often formulated in terms of social welfare functions which are essentially and importantly non-satiable. However, there are good reasons to consider certain normative criteria and many policy objectives to be capped, i.e. bounded, and thus satiable provided sufficient resources are made available for their satisfaction. Inspired by the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke class of indicators, this paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to develop a model for assessing outcomes in terms of capped objectives (...) based on an understanding of individual shortfalls from the objective, denoted needs. We present an indicator to measure need satisfaction in a population of individuals with heterogeneous needs and highlight an aggregation problem under scarcity. For such situations, we develop three ways in which the indicator can be weighted that reflect respectively concerns over the frequency, depth and severity of the need shortfalls and show that normative evaluations based on these weighting schemes can conflict, yielding mutually inconsistent outcome rankings. The indicator can be adapted to measure a wide variety of phenomena, e.g. health needs, education shortfalls, deprivation, etc., and it is suited for targeting exercises and other policy implementations. In particular, it allows for exogenous weighting schemes, i.e. weights that can incorporate non-shortfall characteristics relevant for the evaluation, e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, etc. The indicator thus enables new ways for researchers to promote and study satiable objectives in a wide variety of contexts relevant to economic and social policy, e.g. human development programs, poverty reduction, healthcare policies, etc. (shrink)

An axiomatic basis for a social preference ordering with interval-scaled utility levels satisfying the principles of anonymity and pareto superiority is elaborated. The ordering is required to be sensitive to distributional equality: Redistribution of utility income from poor to rich persons without changing their social rank should lead to a superior evaluation. The axiom of separability is weakened in order to make it compatible with distributional equality. We prove that every continuous ordering satisfying the upper axioms can be represented (...) by a utility function which is positively linear on the convex cone of rank-ordered utility vectors. A modified unnormalized Gini coefficient is one possible choice, but it contradicts, as well as related proposals, the principle of adequacy of means for some distribution problems. (shrink)

A just social arrangement must guarantee a right to health care for all. This right should be understood as a positive right to basic human functional capabilities. The present article aims to delineate the right to health care as part of an account of distributive justice in health care in terms of the sufficiency of basic human functional capabilities. According to the proposed account, every individual currently living beneath the sufficiency threshold or in jeopardy of falling beneath the threshold has (...) a legitimate claim to justice. People's entitlements to health care should not be determined on the basis of brute luck and their efforts to maintain healthy lifestyles. The prioritization of competing claim-rights of individuals is guided by two allocation principles: number and benefit-size weighted sufficiency (among people beneath the threshold) and need-weighted utilitarianism (among people above the threshold). (shrink)

This paper is about the role of interpersonal comparisons in Harsanyi's aggregation theorem. Harsanyi interpreted his theorem to show that a broadly utilitarian theory of distribution must be true even if there are no interpersonal comparisons of well-being. How is this possible? The orthodox view is that it is not. Some argue that the interpersonal comparability of well-being is hidden in Harsanyi's premises. Others argue that it is a surprising conclusion of Harsanyi's theorem, which is not presupposed by any one (...) of the premises. I argue instead that Harsanyi was right: his theorem and its weighted-utilitarian conclusion do not require interpersonal comparisons of well-being. The key to making sense of this possibility is to treat Harsanyi's weights as dimensional constants rather than dimensionless numbers. (shrink)