Average utilitarianism and several related axiologies, when paired with the standard expectational theory of decision-making under risk reasonable empirical credences, can find their pract...

What are the distributive implications of utilitarianism? Is it compatible with a concern for equality, as many utilitarians have argued? We analyse these questions in context pure allocation problem. consider an infinitely-lived economy and, drawing on behavioural literature, assume that individuals reference-dependent preferences: agents’ utility is function current consumption and reference ...

Utilitarianism is the ethical doctrine that the moral worth of an action is solely determined by its contribution to overall utility. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome—the ends justify the means. Utility — the good to be maximized — has been defined by various thinkers as happiness or pleasure (versus sadness or pain), ...

this paper compares the thought of miff and mutahhari, particuiar/y their vie1vs of moral education, higher sentiments, and their common values. itfurthermore argues that miff and mutahhari both provide a strong basis for a critique of the consumerivation of culture, ivhich often happens in a giobaiized econ

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...

The Utilitarian ideal is equal regard for all individuals — those now living and those not yet born. This paper shows that operationalizing this ideal is problematic: the existence of preferences that regard all individuals equally and respect the Pareto ordering is undecidable on the basis of the axioms used in almost all of formal economics; in particular, such preferences cannot be “construc...

Since Becker (3), a common argument against asymmetric norms that promote minority rights over those of the majority is that such policies reduce total welfare. While this may be the case, we show that there are simple environments where aggregate sum of individual utilities is actually maximized under asymmetric norms that favor minorities. We thus maintain that without information regarding i...