A Fairness Justification of Utilitarianism

Fairness and Utilitarianism without Independence

In this work we reconsider Harsanyi’s celebrated (1953, 1955, 1977) utilitarian impartial observer theorem. Departing from Harsanyi’s individual-centered approach, we argue that, when societal decisions are at stake, postulates must not be drawn from individualistic behavior. Rather, they should be based on societal norms. Hence, notions like societal fairness should explicitly be taken as the ...

Basic and legal analysis of the justification or non-justification of killing in defense of property

Justifying or not justifying killing in defense of property has always been a challenging issue for jurists Western jurists have studied such killing in the light of the principle of proportionalit. . That is,whether there is a balance and proportionality between defensive action - killing aggressor- and aggressive action - attacking property – or not. based on this principle, some believe that...

Utilitarianism and Personal Identity

New axiomatic characterizations of utilitarianism

JEL classification: C65, D63, D71, D81 Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 91B16

Statistical utilitarianism

We show that, in a sufficiently large population satisfying certain statistical regularities, it is often possible to accurately estimate the utilitarian social welfare function, even if we only have very noisy data about individual utility functions and interpersonal utility comparisons. In particular, we show that it is often possible to identify an optimal or close-to-optimal utilitarian soc...