Utilitarianism and prioritarianism II

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.

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.

Utilitas, 2012

This article seeks to defend prioritarianism against a pair of challenges from Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve. Otsuka and Voorhoeve first argue that prioritarianism makes implausible recommendations in one-person cases under conditions of risk, as it fails to allow that it is reasonable to act to maximize expected utility, rather than expected weighted benefits, in such cases. I show that, in response, prioritarians can either reject Otsuka and Voorhoeve's claim, by means of appealing to a distinction between personal and impersonal value, or alternatively they can harmlessly accommodate it, by means of appealing to the status of prioritarianism as a view about the moral value of outcomes, rather than as an account of all-things-considered reasonable action. Otsuka and Voorhoeve secondly claim that prioritarianism fails to explain a divergence in our considered moral judgement between one-person and many-person cases. I show that the prioritarian has two alternative, and inde...

Utilitas, 2012

This article seeks to defend prioritarianism against a pair of challenges from Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve. Otsuka and Voorhoeve first argue that prioritarianism makes implausible recommendations in one-person cases under conditions of risk, as it fails to allow that it is reasonable to act to maximize expected utility, rather than expected weighted benefits, in such cases. I show that, in response, prioritarians can either reject Otsuka and Voorhoeve's claim, by means of appealing to a distinction between personal and impersonal value, or alternatively they can harmlessly accommodate it, by means of appealing to the status of prioritarianism as a view about the moral value of outcomes, rather than as an account of all-things-considered reasonable action. Otsuka and Voorhoeve secondly claim that prioritarianism fails to explain a divergence in our considered moral judgement between one-person and many-person cases. I show that the prioritarian has two alternative, and independently plausible, lines of response to this charge, one more concessive and the other more unyielding. Hence, neither of Otsuka and Voorhoeve's challenges need seriously trouble the prioritarian.

Prioritarianism is nowadays understood as the doctrine in distributive justice, which advocates the maximization of weighted utility. This article argues that this narrow reading does not correspond to Parfit's original introduction of the view. I suggest to understand prioritarianism more broadly as referring to a family of views that are developed in light of the prioritarian intuition that benefitting people matters more the worse off these people are. Broad priori-tarianism is neither committed to a utilitarian currency, nor weighting, nor maximization. Making this distinction has a number of important taxonomic and substantial implications. First, recent arguments against prioritarianism do not refute prioritarianism in the broader sense but only the narrow, utili-tarian variant of it. Second, narrow and broad prioritarianism fail to live up to Parfit's claim that prioritarianism is a complete view that can replace exist-ing views in distributive justice. Third, broad prioritarianism is not an antag-onist but rather combinable with views such as utilitarianism, egalitarianism and sufficientarianism. Last, the prioritarian intuition has strong force but is by no means universally accepted. Prioritarians need to put more attention to defending and specifying their basic intuition.

Economics and Philosophy 33(2) (2017): 215-257, 2017

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.

In a recent article, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve argue that prioritarianism fails to account for the shift in moral significance in gains to individuals in interpersonal as compared to intrapersonal cases. In this article, I show that the priority view escapes this objection but in a way that deprives it of (some of) its anti-egalitarian stance. Despite Otsuka and Voorhoeve, prioritarianism, rightly understood, provides consistent and attractive recommendations in both single-and multi-person cases. Yet prioritarians, the article goes on to show, cannot do so while availing themselves of the leveling down objection (LDO) to egalitarianism. They may not do so because similarly to egalitarianism, prioritarianism also must reject the principle of personal good. That is, egalitarians and prioritarians may sometime recommend certain actions and outcomes even when these are better for no one. Prioritarians may survive the Otsuka-Voorhoeve critique, but to do so they must abandon their anti-egalitarian stance (or at the very least, the LDO).

Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 2019

In this article, I firstly discuss why a prioritarian clause can rescue the utilitarian doctrine from the risk of exacerbating inequality in the distribution of resources in those cases in which utility of income does not decline at the margin. Nonetheless, when in the presence of adaptive preferences, classic prioritarianism is more likely than utilitarianism to increase the inequality of re- sources under all circumstances, independently of the diminishing trend of utility. Hence, I propose to shift the informational focus of prioritarianism from welfare to either social income or capabilities in order to safeguard those who are worse off . Following this, I argue that we may have reasons to limit the aggregative logic of priority amended utilitarianism through one or more sufficiency thresholds, an d that we can partially defuse the negative thesis objection that is usually levelled against sufficientarianism, provided we interpret the threshold(s) as valid only as long as everyone is led above it.

Journal of Philosophy

Prioritarianism is a distinctive moral view. Outcomes are ranked according to the sum of concavely transformed well-being numbers—by contrast with utilitarianism, which simply adds up well-being. Thus, unlike utilitarians, prioritarians give extra moral weight to the well-being of the worse off. Unlike egalitarians, prioritarians endorse an axiom of person-separability: the ranking of outcomes is independent of the well-being levels of unaffected individuals. Unlike sufficientists, who give no priority to the worse-off if their well-being exceeds a “sufficiency” threshold, prioritarians always favor the worse-off in conflicts with those at higher well-being levels. Derek Parfit is prioritarianism’s most famous proponent. We have also defended prioritarianism. Not everyone is persuaded. Prioritarianism has been vigorously criticized, from a variety of perspectives, most visibly by John Broome, Campbell Brown, Lara Buchak, Roger Crisp, Hilary Greaves, David McCarthy, Michael Otsuka, Ingmar Persson, Shlomi Segall, Larry Temkin, and Alex Voorhoeve. In this Article, we answer the critics.