Utilitarianism: A Contemporary Statement (Robin Barrow)

Robin Hanson Statement on Teaching

For example, I learned that students are far more willing to believe physicists about physics, than to believe economists about economics. To help overcome this skepticism, I run some classroom experiments in my microeconomics courses. These experiments give students a good initial hook for the concepts of marginal value and cost, and they show that standard theory predicts experimental outcome...

Contemporary treatment principles for early rheumatoid arthritis: a consensus statement.

OBJECTIVE RA has a substantial impact on both patients and healthcare systems. Our objective is to advance the understanding of modern management principles in light of recent evidence concerning the condition's diagnosis and treatment. METHODS A group of practicing UK rheumatologists formulated contemporary management principles and clinical practice recommendations concerning both diagnosis...

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