Undiscounted utilitarianism as a criterion of intergeneration justice has been questioned for different reasons: It has been argued (1) that any complete ordering of allocations with an infinite number of generations guaranteeing an optimal allocation must involve discounting, and (2) that undiscounted utilitarianism subjects the present generation to heavy demands and leads to outcomes that do...

Abstract Is an outcome where many people are saved and one person dies better than the is die? According to standard utilitarian justification, former because it has a greater sum total of well-being. This justification involves controversial form moral aggregation, based on comparison between aggregates different people’s Still, alternative justification—the Argument for Best Outcomes—does not...

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...

This chapter works within a particular framework for reasoning about actions – sometimes known as the framework of “stit semantics” – originally due to Belnap and Perloff, based ultimately on the theory of indeterminism set out in Prior’s indeterministic tense logic, and developed in full detail by Belnap et al. (2001). The issues I want to consider arise when certain normative, or decision the...

Background: Utilitarianism is a school whose founders have justified it by emphasizing consequentialism as a public interest. The school of utilitarianism is a moral and naturalistic school that justifies principles such as justice and individual and collective freedoms. For utilitarian, one cannot rely solely on individual interests and neglect the collective interest or group interest. Human ...

In this paper, we study consumption decisions under risk assuming a prioritarian social welfare function, namely a concave transformation of individual utility functions. Under standard assumptions, there is always more current consumption under ex ante prioritarianism than under utilitarianism. Thus, a concern for equity (in the ex ante prioritarian sense) means less concern for the risky futu...