II. —PROFESSOR SIDGWICK'S UTILITARIANISM

Utilitarianism and prioritarianism II

Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to John Broome, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Bertil Tungodden and an anonymous referee for exceptionally detailed comments. I have also benefited from comments by audiences at Oxford and Konstanz. Support for this project was provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and also by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Education a...

A Critical Reflection on Utilitarianism as the Basis for Psychiatric Ethics Part II: Utilitarianism and Psychiatry

Whilst many factors influence its craft, psychiatry is ultimately considered a profession. Any medical practitioner abides by a social contract as both a healer and professional (ABIM Foundation, ACP-ASIM Foundation, & EFIM, 2002). Physicians have reaffirmed the concept of medicine as a profession, in the face of commercialization of healthcare, globalization and advances in biotechnology. Crue...

Utilitarianism and Personal Identity

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...

Utilitarianism, Conscience and Animals