In this paper, first the term 'prioritarianism' is defined, with some mathematical precision, on the basis of intuitive conceptions of prioritarianism, especially the idea that "benefiting people matters more the worse off these people are". (The prioritarian weighting function is monotonously ascending and concave, while its first derivation is smoothly descending and convex but positive throughout.) Furthermore, (moderate welfare) egalitarianism is characterized. In particular a new symmetry condition is defended, i.e. that egalitarianism evaluates upper and lower deviations from the social (...) middle symmetrically and equally negatively (as do e.g. variance and Gini). Finally, it is shown that this feature distinguishes egalitarianism also extensionally from prioritarianism. (shrink)

This volume collects selected papers delivered at the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, which was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in July 2018. It includes papers dealing with the past, present, and future of utilitarianism – the theory that human happiness is the fundamental moral value – as well as on its applications to animal ethics, population ethics, and the future of humanity, among other topics.

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, (...) we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is often criticized because of its reliance on the interpersonal aggregation of harms and benefits. However, since the rejection of all forms of interpersonal aggregation strikes most people as implausible, some critics of utilitarianism have proposed theories of Limited Aggregation. These occupy the middle ground between fully aggregative and non-aggregative views. Recently, Limited Aggregation has been criticized for having counterintuitive implications that seem even worse than the counterintuitive implications of fully aggregative and non-aggregative views it tried to escape. I (...) here propose a new view of Limited Aggregation that does better than existing accounts in this regard. It is more modest than existing accounts of Limited Aggregation, but it retains the view's core idea. This, I claim, is the thought that sometimes very strong individual claims stand in the way of realizing the best outcome. (shrink)

We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is too narrow. Other ethical issues are equally important to computing the social cost of carbon, and we highlight inequality, risk, and population ethics. Although the usual approach, in the economics of cost-benefit analysis for climate policy, is confined to a utilitarian axiology, the methodology of the social cost of carbon is rather flexible and can be expanded (...) to a broader set of social-welfare approaches. [Open access]. (shrink)

According to the priority view, or prioritarianism, it matters more to benefit people the worse off they are. But how exactly should the priority view be defined? This article argues for a highly general characterization which essentially involves risk, but makes no use of evaluative measurements or the expected utility axioms. A representation theorem is provided, and when further assumptions are added, common accounts of the priority view are recovered. A defense of the key idea behind the priority view, the (...) priority principle, is provided. But it is argued that the priority view fails on both ethical and conceptual grounds. (shrink)

Egalitarians think that equality in the distribution of goods somehow matters. But what exactly is egalitarianism? This article argues for a characterization based on novel principles essentially involving risk. The characterization is then used to resolve disputed questions about egalitarianism. These include: the way egalitarianism is concerned with patterns, in particular its relationship to strong separability; the relationship between egalitarianism and other distributive views, such as concerns with fairness and with giving priority to the worse off; and the relationship between (...) egalitarianism and evaluative measurement. But egalitarianism is subject to a particularly severe form of the levelling-down objection, and is claimed to be false. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 46-47, December 2011.

Some moral theorists defend a holistic account of practical reasons and deny that the possibility of moral thought depends upon the existence of moral principles. This article explores the implications of this position for theorising about justice, which has often aspired to provide us with an ordered list of principles to govern our institutions and practices.

According to the Maximin principle of distributive justice, one outcome is more just than another if the worst off individual in the first outcome is better off than the worst off individual in the second. This is often interpreted as a highly egalitarian principle, and, more specifically, as a highly egalitarian way of balancing a concern with equality against a concern with efficiency. But this interpretation faces a challenge: why should a concern with efficiency and equality lead us to a (...) concern only for the very worst off? Egalitarian proponents of Maximin tend to meet this challenge by showing that it possible to formally derive Maximin from surprisingly weak conditions relating efficiency and equality to justice. But in this paper, I argue that this reply fails. The issue is not that the proofs are invalid, but instead that every existing proof of Maximin transforms into an impossibility result as soon as we realize that any reasonable conception of equality must satisfy a certain formal property. The upshot is that even if it is possible to defend Maximin on other grounds, there is no known way to defend it on the grounds that it balances a concern with equality against a concern for efficiency. Further, more general implications of this result for egalitarian theories of distributive justice are also explored. (shrink)

I begin, in section 1, with a presentation of the Interpersonal Addition Theorem. The theorem, due to John Broome (1991), is a re-formulation of the classical result by Harsanyi (1955). It implies that, given some seemingly mild assumptions, the overall utility of an uncertain prospect can be seen as the sum of its individual utilities. In sections 1 and 2, I discuss the theorem's connection with utilitarianism and in particular consider its implications for the Priority View, according to which benefits (...) to the worse off count for more, in terms of overall utility, than comparable benefits to the better off (cf. Parfit 1995 [1991]). Broome (1991) and Klint Jensen (1996) have argued that, in view of the Interpersonal Addition Theorem, the Priority View should be rejected for measurement-theoretical reasons. Therefore, it cannot be seen as a plausible competitor to utilitarianism (cf. section 1). I will suggest, however, that a proponent of the Priority View would be well-advised, on independent grounds, to reject one of the basic assumptions on which the Addition Theorem is based. I have in mind the so-called Principle of Personal Good for uncertain prospects (cf. sections 4 and 5). If the theorem is disarmed in this way, then, as a side benefit, the Priority View will avoid the afore-mentioned problems with measurement. (shrink)

Parfit advertised the priority view as a new and fundamental theory in the ethics of distribution. He never discusses risk, and many writers follow suit when discussing the priority view. This article formalizes two popular arguments for a commonly accepted risk-free definition of the priority view. One is based on a direct attempt to define the priority view, the other is based on a contrast with utilitarianism and egalitarianism. But neither argument succeeds, and more generally, it is not possible to (...) make sense of the priority view in a risk-free framework. The article pays particular attention to the proper role of evaluative measurements in theorizing about the ethics of distribution. Despite appearances, approaching the priority view in terms of risk from the outset is argued to be quite natural. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel account of how complaints of unfairness arise in risky distributive cases. According to a recently proposed view in distributive ethics, the Competing Claims View, an individual has a claim to a benefit when her well-being is at stake, and the strength of this claim is determined by the expected gain to the individual’s well-being, along with how worse off the individual is compared to others. If an individual is at a lower level of well-being than (...) another, their claim to a given benefit is stronger. On this view, the strength of individuals’ claims are a function of their comparative well-being levels. In this paper, I instead argue that competing claims obtain only when a particular relationship obtains between the fates of individuals: that one individual’s gain is at the expense of another. This is a particular complaint that obtains when the fates of individuals are tied together in such a way that inequality that is to the detriment of the person who is worse off is guaranteed to obtain. I demonstrate that this complaint arises only when individuals are exposed to a particular type of risk that allows some to gain only if others lose. As such, I propose that complaints of unfairness occur less frequently than we might think if we take the Competing Claims View to be true. A purely comparative view is unable to account for this unique complaint of unfairness. I argue that this complaint is not only independently plausible, but can serve as a foundation for a more general account of competing claims complaints. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that even though egalitarianism and prioritarianism are different theories of social welfare, they can use the same social welfare measures. I present six different arguments for this thesis. The first argument is that conceptual connections between egalitarianism and prioritarianism ensure that any measure that works for either theory works for both. The second argument is that conditions necessary and sufficient to identify egalitarian and prioritarian measures, respectively, are equivalent. The third argument is that both egalitarianism (...) and prioritarianism can use two standard measures, typically proposed for only one theory. The fourth to sixth arguments contend that four properties that have been proposed as distinctive of either egalitarian or prioritarian measures cannot distinguish between them. I conclude that any egalitarian measure is also a prioritarian measure, and vice versa. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, there have been intense debates concerning the effects of markets on the morality of individuals’ behaviour. On the one hand, several authors argue that markets’ ongoing expansion tends to undermine individuals’ intentions for mutual benefit and virtuous character traits and actions. On the other hand, leading economists and philosophers characterize markets as a domain of intentional cooperation for mutual benefit that promotes many of the character traits and actions that traditional virtue ethics accounts classify as (...) virtuous. In this paper, I join this debate and argue for three claims of general interest to philosophers, economists and policy makers. First, market transactions do not reliably promote individuals’ intentions for mutual benefit, and often select against such intentions. Second, the set of so-called market virtues lacks a substantial overlap with the set of character traits that traditional virtue ethics accounts classify as virtuous. And third, many seemingly virtuous actions observed in market contexts are merely actions in accordance with virtue rather than genuine actions from virtue. These three claims do not license opposition to markets, but challenge the main empirical and theoretical presuppositions of leading virtue ethics defences of markets. (shrink)

Prioritarianism is a moral view that ranks outcomes according to the sum of a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation of individual well-being. Prioritarianism is ‘welfarist’ (namel...

Suppose that you must make choices that may influence the well-being and the identities of the people who will exist, though not the number of people who will exist. How ought you to choose? This paper answers this question. It argues that the currency of distributive ethics in such cases is a combination of an individual’s final well-being and her expected well-being conditional on her existence. It also argues that this currency should be distributed in an egalitarian, rather than a (...) prioritarian, manner. (shrink)

:This paper questions the distinction between egalitarianism and prioritarianism, arguing that it is important to separate the reasons for particular social preferences from the contents of these preferences, that it is possible to like equality and separability simultaneously, and that some egalitarians and prioritarians may therefore share the same social preferences. The case of risky prospects, for which Broome has proposed an interesting example meant to show that egalitarians and prioritarians cannot share the same preferences, is scrutinized. The levelling down (...) objection is also examined. (shrink)