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  1. Anarchy, State, and Utopia.Robert Nozick - 1974 - New York: Basic Books.
    Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.
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  • (1 other version)Anarchy, State, and Utopia.Robert Nozick - 1974 - Philosophy 52 (199):102-105.
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  • Weighing lives.John Broome - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    We are often faced with choices that involve the weighing of people's lives against each other, or the weighing of lives against other good things. These are choices both for individuals and for societies. A person who is terminally ill may have to choose between palliative care and more aggressive treatment, which will give her a longer life but at some cost in suffering. We have to choose between the convenience to ourselves of road and air travel, and the lives (...)
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  • Ethics without numbers.Jacob Nebel - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):289-319.
    This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...)
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  • Collective Choice and Social Welfare: An Expanded Edition.Amartya Sen - 2017 - Harvard University Press.
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  • Ethics Out of Economics.John Broome - 1999 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Many economic problems are also ethical problems: should we value economic equality? how much should we care about preserving the environment? how should medical resources be divided between saving life and enhancing life? This book examines some of the practical issues that lie between economics and ethics, and shows how utility theory can contribute to ethics. John Broome's work has, unusually, combined sophisticated economic and philosophical expertise, and Ethics Out of Economics brings together some of his most important essays, augmented (...)
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  • Rational Behaviour and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations.John C. Harsanyi - 1977 - Cambridge University Press.
    This is a paperback edition of a major contribution to the field, first published in hard covers in 1977. The book outlines a general theory of rational behaviour consisting of individual decision theory, ethics, and game theory as its main branches. Decision theory deals with a rational pursuit of individual utility; ethics with a rational pursuit of the common interests of society; and game theory with an interaction of two or more rational individuals, each pursuing his own interests in a (...)
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  • Utils and Shmutils.Jacob M. Nebel - 2021 - Ethics 131 (3):571-599.
    Matthew Adler's Measuring Social Welfare is an introduction to the social welfare function (SWF) methodology. This essay questions some ideas at the core of the SWF methodology having to do with the relation between the SWF and the measure of well-being. The facts about individual well-being do not single out a particular scale on which well-being must be measured. As with physical quantities, there are multiple scales that can be used to represent the same information about well-being; no one scale (...)
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  • Social Choice and Individual Values.Kenneth Joseph Arrow - 1951 - New York, NY, USA: Wiley: New York.
    The literature on the theory of social choice has grown considerably beyond the few items in existence at the time the first edition of this book appeared in 1951. Some of the new literature has dealt with the technical, mathematical aspects, more with the interpretive. My own thinking has also evolved somewhat, although I remain far from satisfied with present formulations. The exhaustion of the first edition provides a convenient time for a selective and personal stocktaking in the form of (...)
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  • Aggregation Without Interpersonal Comparisons of Well‐Being.Jacob M. Nebel - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1):18-41.
    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 (...)
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  • Population Issues in Social Choice Theory, Welfare Economics, and Ethics.Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David J. Donaldson - 2005 - Cambridge University Press.
    This book presents an exploration of the idea of the common or social good, extended so that alternatives with different populations can be ranked. The approach is, in the main, welfarist, basing rankings on the well-being, broadly conceived, of those who are alive. The axiomatic method is employed, and topics investigated include: the measurement of individual well-being, social attitudes toward inequality of well-being, the main classes of population principles, principles that provide incomplete rankings, principles that rank uncertain alternatives, best choices (...)
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  • The Sum of Well-Being.Jacob M. Nebel - 2023 - Mind 132 (528):1074–1104.
    Is well-being the kind of thing that can be summed across individuals? This paper takes a measurement-theoretic approach to answering this question. To make sense of adding well-being, we would need to identify some natural "concatenation" operation on the bearers of well-being that satisfies the axioms of extensive measurement and can therefore be represented by the arithmetic operation of addition. I explore various proposals along these lines, involving the concatenation of segments within lives over time, of entire lives led alongside (...)
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  • The impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons.Daniel Hausman - 1995 - Mind 104 (415):473-490.
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  • The Pursuit of Happiness: Philosophical and Psychological Foundations of Utility.Louis Narens & Brian Skyrms - 2020 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by Brian Skyrms.
    Utilitarianism is one of the most famous ethical doctrines, based on the ideal of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. But Utilitarians and their opponents lack a clear scientific and philosophical understanding of its foundations, the measurement and aggregation of utility. This is what The Pursuit of Happiness now offers.
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  • A set of independent axioms for extensive quantities.Patrick Suppes - 1951 - Portugaliae Mathematica 10 (4):163-172.
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  • A reconsideration of the Harsanyi–Sen debate on utilitarianism.John A. Weymark - 1991 - In Jon Elster & John Roemer (eds.), Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 255.
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  • Extended sympathy and the possibility of social choice.Kenneth J. Arrow - 1978 - Philosophia 7 (2):223-237.
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  • Measurement scales and welfarist social choice.Michael Morreau & John A. Weymark - 2016 - Journal of Mathematical Psychology 75:127-136.
    The social welfare functional approach to social choice theory fails to distinguish a genuine change in individual well-beings from a merely representational change due to the use of different measurement scales. A generalization of the concept of a social welfare functional is introduced that explicitly takes account of the scales that are used to measure well-beings so as to distinguish between these two kinds of changes. This generalization of the standard theoretical framework results in a more satisfactory formulation of welfarism, (...)
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  • A New Interpretation of the Representational Theory of Measurement.Conrad Heilmann - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):787-797.
    On the received view, the Representational Theory of Measurement reduces measurement to the numerical representation of empirical relations. This account of measurement has been widely criticized. In this article, I provide a new interpretation of the Representational Theory of Measurement that sidesteps these debates. I propose to view the Representational Theory of Measurement as a library of theorems that investigate the numerical representability of qualitative relations. Such theorems are useful tools for concept formation that, in turn, is one crucial aspect (...)
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  • Some formal models of grading principles.Patrick Suppes - 1966 - Synthese 16 (3-4):284 - 306.
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  • The moral basis of interpersonal comparisons.Thomas M. Scanlon - 1991 - In Jon Elster & John Roemer (eds.), Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 17--44.
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  • Impact of population growth and population ethics on climate change mitigation policy.Mark Budolfson, Noah Scovronick, Francis Dennig, Marc Fleurbaey, Asher Siebert, Robert H. Socolow, Dean Spears & Fabian Wagner - 2017 - Pnas 114 (46).
    Future population growth is uncertain and matters for climate policy: higher growth entails more emissions and means more people will be vulnerable to climate-related impacts. We show that how future population is valued importantly determines mitigation decisions. Using the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, we explore two approaches to valuing population: a discounted version of total utilitarianism (TU), which considers total wellbeing and is standard in social cost of carbon dioxide (SCC) models, and of average utilitarianism (AU), which ignores population size (...)
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  • Unbounded Utility.Zachary Goodsell - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
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  • (1 other version)Theories of Distributive Justice.John E. Roemer - 1997 - Mind 106 (424):795-797.
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  • Extended Preferences and Interpersonal Comparisons: A New Account.Matthew D. Adler - 2014 - Economics and Philosophy 30 (2):123-162.
    This paper builds upon, but substantially revises, John Harsanyi's concept of ‘extended preferences’. An individual ‘history’ is a possible life that some person (a subject) might lead. Harsanyi supposes that a given spectator, formulating her ethical preferences, can rank histories by empathetic projection: putting herself ‘in the shoes’ of various subjects. Harsanyi then suggests that interpersonal comparisons be derived from the utility function representing spectators’ (supposedly common) ranking of history lotteries. Unfortunately, Harsanyi's proposal has various flaws, including some that have (...)
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  • Health care and the prospective pareto principle.Allan Gibbard - 1984 - Ethics 94 (2):261-282.
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  • Facts and values in modern economics.Partha Dasgupta - 2009 - In Don Ross & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 580--640.
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  • Reply to Putnam and Walsh.Partha Dasgupta - 2007 - Economics and Philosophy 23 (3):365-372.
    Social thinkers frequently remind us that people differ on what constitutes personal well-being, but that even when they don't differ, they disagree over the extent to which one person's well-being can be permitted to be traded off against another's. They tell us that political differences are to be traced to differences in people's conceptions of personal and social well-being. We are given to understand, in other words, that people's ethics differ.
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