Utilitarianism without individual utilities

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 ...

A Representative Individual from Arrovian Aggregation of Parametric Individual Utilities

This article investigates the representative-agent hypothesis for a population which faces a collective choice from a given finite-dimensional space of alternatives. Each individual’s preference ordering is assumed to admit a utility representaion through an element of an exogenously given set of admissible utility functions. In addition, we assume that (i) the class of admissible utility funct...

Utilitarianism without Consequentialism: The Case of John Stuart Mill

In this essay I will argue, flouting paradox, that Mill was a utilitarian but not a consequentialist. According to the textbook definition, of course, utilitarianism just is the combination of a certain sort of theory of the good (as pleasure, happiness, or flourishing) and a consequentialist theory of the right. My conclusion thus seems necessarily false. Nevertheless, the argument will procee...

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...