Utilitarianismf Priwenew

Utilitas, 2015

A simple hedonistic theory allowing for interpersonal comparisons of happiness is taken for granted in this article. The hedonistic theory is used to compare utilitarianism, urging us to maximize the sum total of happiness, with prioritarianism, urging us to maximize a sum total of weighed happiness. It is argued with reference to a few thought experiments that utilitarianism is, intuitively speaking, more plausible than prioritarianism. The problem with prioritarianism surfaces when prudence and morality come apart.

Journal of Philosophy

Routledge eBooks, 2018

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2005

Economics and Philosophy 22(3) (2006): 335–63, 2006

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.

2008

In his metaethics and philosophy of language, Jeremy Bentham was strongly influenced by John Locke's empiricist framework. In his works on logic and mind (but also in his ethical writings), John Stuart Mill displayed a blend of empiricism and common sense philosophy, which he inherited from his father James. In addition to this, both Bentham and Mill viewed ethics and politics as empirical disciplines, based on human experience, and modeled after empirical, inexact disciplines, such as medicine. Despite his intuitionist leanings, even Henry Sidgwick presented his moral epistemology as a correction of an originally empiricist framework. Moreover, in Sidgwick's argument for utilitarianism, a lot of room is left to the power that a utilitarian ethical theory has in accounting for our common moral experience, embodied in our common sense moral judgements. Even through the twentieth century, utilitarianism has kept its connection with human experience, if only because of its frequent and numerous incursions in detailed applicative problems. Possibly, utilitarian ethical thinkers were the first to realize a turn to applied ethical theory. Paradoxically, the often repeated and most well-known objection to utilitarianism, namely its alleged counter-intuitiveness, concerns the relationship between utilitarian ethics and experience. This aspect of utilitarian moral theories was placed at the center of the three-day Conference "Utilitarianism: An Ethic of Experience?" (held at the University of Rome, June 12-14, 2007), where the papers published here were originally presented and discussed. From the many presentations, discussions, and informal talks that happened in those three days in Rome, it turned out that the question mark at the end of the conference title, originally indicating the ironic, yet provocative and wary spirit the organizers had toward the subject, could be removed safely. Experience is at the centre of utilitarianism, both in its historical and contemporary versions. Experience, however, is only a common point of departure, and it is not able to settle the various puzzles that scholars interested in utilitarianism must face. It is also for this reason that the title of the present collection was changed to a more neutral one, aiming to show the two directions assumed by the contemporary scholarship: an increasing penetration into the historical texts of eighteenth and nineteenth century utilitarians and a more detailed refinement of utilitarian ethical theories to respond classical and new objections and problems.

John Rawls' theory of "justice as fairness" aimed at presenting a superior alternative to utilitarianism. To do so, he argued that, from behind the veil of ignorance, the representatives in the original position would choose the principles of justice as fairness and would reject utilitarianism. Rawls' criticism was targeted to the classical version of utilitarianism, which places utility at the level of the individual and as some measure of happiness or wellbeing. In this paper, I attempt to introduce David Hume's concept of justice as a utilitarian theory that, first, is fundamentally different to the classical version, and two, escapes the criticism of Rawls, at least in terms of the latter's rejection of utilitarianism. I will do this by first showing that Hume's concept of utility, as opposed to Bentham's, is a means and not an end, and a means to the public interest. Then, I will argue that the public interest is for Hume an emergent property of the social order that results from the interactions of human beings, just like some properties of complex biological and physical systems arise from the interactions of its members. Next, I will show that Hume's theory is utilitarian because it rests on an argument including a contingent claim based on the consequences of human decisions: a social order can exist only if individuals cooperate under the strict observance of the three fundamental laws of justice. Finally, I will show that Rawls' criticism does not apply to Hume's theory.

This article is an attempt to take an overview of the current position of utilitarian theory. It begins by providing a definition of utilitarianism as it is found in the works of Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick. These authors are all interpreted as intuitionists. It is claimed that the main rivals to utilitarianism are egoism on the one hand, and reflective non-egoistic pluralism, as found in the work of Ross, on the other. The significance of disagreement between proponents of these views is explained, and modern attempts to ground utilitarianism are found lacking. The article ends with a plea for history.

Suppose that a social behaviour norm specifies ethical decisions at all decision nodes of every finite decision tree whose terminal nodes have consequences in a given domain. Suppose too that behaviour is both consistent in subtrees and continuous as probabilities vary. Suppose that the social consequence domain consists of profiles of individual consequences defined broadly enough so that only individuals' random consequences should matter, and not the structure of any decision tree. Finally, suppose that each individual has a "welfare behaviour norm" coinciding with the social norm for decision trees where only that individual's random consequences are affected by any decision. Then, after suitable normalizations, the social norm must maximize the expected value of a sum of individual welfare functions over the feasible set of random consequences. Moreover, individuals who never exist can be accorded a zero welfare level provided that any decision is acceptable on their behalf. These arguments lead to a social objective whose structural form is that of classical utilitarianism, even though individual welfare should probably be interpreted very differently from classical utility.