Bentham’s binary form of maximizing utilitarianism

Beyond "utilitarianism": maximizing the clinical impact of moral judgment research.

The use of hypothetical moral dilemmas--which pit utilitarian considerations of welfare maximization against emotionally aversive "personal" harms--has become a widespread approach for studying the neuropsychological correlates of moral judgment in healthy subjects, as well as in clinical populations with social, cognitive, and affective deficits. In this article, we propose that a refinement o...

Utilitarianism and equality for quasilinear or Gorman-form preferences

The paper shows that if utility is cardinally measurable and fully interpersonally comparable and the utility profile satisfies (a) a happier person has lower marginal utility of the numeraire or wealth, and (b) “everybody is equally unhappy in hell,” the utilitarian criterion is egalitarian for quasilinear economies or Gorman-form preferences . JEL Classification: D6

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...