Just Better Utilitarianism

Better-Not Just Bigger-Data Analytics.

Although the phrase Big Data Analytics is relatively new, the practice of leveraging large data sources is not. Outcomes researchers are familiar with secondary data analyses of diverse data sources that include administrative claims, electronic health records, and clinical registries. Among the most prominent examples is the National Inpatient Sample (NIS). The NIS is constructed by sampling n...

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

Money-metric utilitarianism

We discuss a method of ranking allocations in economic environments which applies when we do not know the names or preferences of individual agents. We require that two allocations can be ranked with the knowledge only of their aggregate bundles and community indifference sets–a condition we refer to as aggregate independence. We also postulate a basic Pareto and continuity property, and a prop...