Risky prospects represent policies that impose different types of risks on multiple people. I present an example from food safety. A utilitarian following Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem ranks such prospects according to their mean expected utility or the expectation of the social utility. Such a ranking is not sensitive to any of four types of distributional concerns. I develop a model that lets the policy analyst rank prospects relative to the distributional concerns that she considers fitting in the context at hand. (...) I name this model ‘the Distribution View’ posing an alternative to Parfit's Priority View for risky prospects. (shrink)

The Interpersonal Addition Theorem, due to John Broome, states that, given certain seemingly innocuous assumptions, the overall utility of an uncertain prospect can be represented as the sum of its individual utilities. Given ‘Bernoulli's hypothesis’ according to which individual utility coincides with individual welfare, this result appears to be incompatible with the Priority View. On that view, due to Derek Parfit, the benefits to the worse off should count for more, in the overall evaluation, than the comparable benefits to the (...) better off. Pace Broome, the paper argues that prioritarians should meet this challenge not by denying Bernoulli's hypothesis, but by rejecting one of the basic assumptions behind the addition theorem: that a prospect is better overall if it is better for everyone. This conclusion follows if one interprets the priority weights that are imposed by prioritarians as relevant only to moral, but not to prudential, evaluations of prospects. (shrink)

One of the central debates within contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy concerns how to formulate an egalitarian theory of distributive justice which gives coherent expression to egalitarian convictions and withstands the most powerful anti-egalitarian objections. This book brings together many of the key contributions to that debate by some of the world’s leading political philosophers: Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, John Rawls, T.M. Scanlon, and Larry Temkin.

I argue that prioritarianism cannot be assessed in abstraction from an account of the measure of utility. Rather, the soundness of this view crucially depends on what counts as a greater, lesser, or equal increase in a person’s utility. In particular, prioritarianism cannot accommodate a normatively compelling measure of utility that is captured by the axioms of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s expected utility theory. Nor can it accommodate a plausible and elegant generalization of this theory that has been (...) offered in response to challenges to von Neumann and Morgenstern. This is, I think, a theoretically interesting and unexpected source of difficulty for prioritarianism, which I explore in this article. (shrink)

Policy-makers must sometimes choose between an alternative which has somewhat lower expected value for each person, but which will substantially improve the outcomes of the worst off, or an alternative which has somewhat higher expected value for each person, but which will leave those who end up worst off substantially less well off. The popular ex ante Pareto principle requires the choice of the alternative with higher expected utility for each. We argue that ex ante Pareto ought to be rejected (...) because it conflicts with the requirement that, when possible, one ought to decide as one would with full information. We apply our argument in an analysis of US policy on screening for breast cancer. -/- . (shrink)

This article discusses the relation between prioritarian and egalitarian principles, whether and why we need to appeal to both kinds of principle, how prioritarians can answer various objections, especially those put forward by Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve, the moral difference between cases in which our acts could affect only one person or two or more people, veil of ignorance contractualism and utilitarianism, what prioritarians should claim about cases in which the effects of our acts are uncertain, the relative moral (...) importance of actual and expectable benefits, whether people should sometimes be given various chances of receiving benefits, and principles that appeal to competing claims. (shrink)

We argue that there is a marked shift in the moral weight of an increment in a person's well-being when one moves from a case involving only intra-personal trade-offs to a case involving only inter-personal trads-offs. This shift, we propose, is required by the separateness of persons. We also argue that the Priority View put forward by Parfit cannot account for such a shift. We also outline two alternative views, an egalitarian view and a claims-based view, that can account for (...) this shift. (shrink)

For a prioritarian by contrast to a utilitarian, whether a certain quantity of utility falls within the boundary of one person's life or another's makes the following moral difference: the worse the life of a person who could receive a given benefit, the stronger moral reason we have to confer this benefit on this person. It would seem, therefore, that prioritarianism succeeds, where utilitarianism fails, to ‘take seriously the distinction between persons’. Yet I show that, contrary to these appearances, prioritarianism (...) fails, in ways strikingly parallel to those in which utilitarianism fails, to take this distinction seriously. In so doing, I draw on and develop an earlier critique of prioritarianism by disentangling and pressing two distinct separateness-of-persons objections offered there. One objection is that prioritarianism is insensitive to ‘prudential justifications’. The other is that it is insensitive to the competing claims of different individuals. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the welfare economics of risk. It singles out a class of criteria, the “expected equally-distributed equivalent”, as the unique class which avoids serious drawbacks of existing approaches. Such criteria behave like ex-post criteria when the final statistical distribution of wellbeing is known ex ante, and like ex-ante criteria when risk generates no inequality. The paper also provides a new result on the tension between inequality aversion and respect of individual ex ante preferences, in the vein of Harsanyi’s (...) aggregation theorem. (shrink)

Utilitarianism and prioritarianism make a strong assumption about the uniqueness of measures of how good things are for people, or for short, individual goodness measures. But it is far from obvious that the presupposition is correct. The usual response to this problem assumes that individual goodness measures are determined independently of our discourse about distributive theories. This article suggests reversing this response. What determines the set of individual goodness measures just is the body of platitudes we accept about distributive theories. (...) When prioritarianism is taken to have an ex ante form, this approach vindicates the utilitarian and prioritarian presupposition, and provides an answer to an argument due to Broome that for different reasons to do with measurement, prioritarianism is meaningless. (shrink)

A natural formalization of the priority view is presented which results from adding expected utility theory to the main ideas of the priority view. The result is ex post prioritarianism. But ex post prioritarianism entails that in a world containing just one person, it is sometimes better for that person to do what is strictly worse for herself. This claim may appear to be implausible. But the deepest objection to ex post prioritarianism has to do with meaning: ex post prioritarianism (...) is not a genuine alternative to utilitarianism in the first place. By contrast, ex ante prioritarianism is defensible. But its motivation is very different from the usual rationales offered for the priority view. Given their hostility to egalitarianism, most supporters of the priority view have not provided reasons to reject utilitarianism. (shrink)

This book addresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the possibility of an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being, or “utility” metric; the moral value of equality, and how that bears on the form of the social welfare function; social choice under uncertainty; and the possibility of integrating considerations of individual choice and responsibility into the social-welfare-function framework. This book also deals with issues of implementation, and explores how survey data and other sources of evidence might be used to calibrate (...) both a utility metric and a social welfare function, and whether distributive goals are ever best pursued through regulation rather than the tax system. In working through this range of theoretical and practical issues, the book draws from a wide variety of literatures, including philosophical scholarship on equality, responsibility, the nature of well-being, and personal identity over time; the social choice literature within economics; applied economic literatures concerning the measurement of inequality and poverty; legal and policy-analysis scholarship on cost-benefit analysis, environmental justice, and the choice between regulation and taxation; and the burgeoning field of “happiness studies”. (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)

Selection of articles by leading international philosophers: Roger Crisp, Fred Feldman, Göran Hermerén, Derek Parfit, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Michael Smith, Paul Snowdon, Galen Strawson, Larry S. Temkin, Torbjörn Tännsjö, and Michael J. Zimmerman. Published in honour of Ingmar Persson on his fiftieth birthday.

This paper takes its departure from the Interpersonal Addition Theorem. The theorem, by John Broome, is a re-formulation of the classical result by Harsanyi. 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 the extent to which this theorem still leaves room for the Priority View. According to the latter, (...) the utilitarian approach needs to be modified: Benefits to the worse off should count for more, overall, than the comparable benefits to the better off.Broome and Jensen have argued that the Priority View cannot be seen as a plausible competitor to utilitarianism: Given the addition theorem, prioritarianism should be rejected for measurement-theoretical reasons. I suggest that this difficulty is spurious: The proponents 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, the so-called Principle of Personal Good for uncertain prospects.According to the Principle of Personal Good, one prospect is better than another if it is better for everyone or at least better for some and worse for none. That the Priority View, as I read it, rejects this welfarist intuition may be surprising. Isn’t welfarism a common ground for prioritarians and utilitarians? Still, as I argue, this welfarist common ground is better captured by a restricted Principle of Personal Good that is valid for *outcomes*, but not necessarily for uncertain prospects. We obtain this surprising result if we take the priority weights imposed by prioritarians to be relevant only to *moral*, but not to *prudential*, evaluations of prospects. This makes it possible for a prospect to be morally better even though it is worse for everyone concerned. The proposed interpretation of the Priority View thus drives a sharp wedge between prudence and morality. (shrink)