This article examines pragmatism and hermeneutics as kindred approaches to action they face the persistent influence of utilitarianism in social life. The essential traits utilitarian paradigm theory are presented, together with critiques theory, articulated by Hans Joas (partially Wolfgang Knöbl). Pragmatism is then presented a response flaws utilitarianism. Next, debate traced from Joas’s Ric...

Research on moral dilemma judgments has been fundamentally shaped by the distinction between utilitarianism and deontology. According to the principle of utilitarianism, the moral status of behavioral options depends on their consequences; the principle of deontology states that the moral status of behavioral options depends on their consistency with moral norms. To identify the processes under...

Whilst many factors influence its craft, psychiatry is ultimately considered a profession. Any medical practitioner abides by a social contract as both a healer and professional (ABIM Foundation, ACP-ASIM Foundation, & EFIM, 2002). Physicians have reaffirmed the concept of medicine as a profession, in the face of commercialization of healthcare, globalization and advances in biotechnology. Crue...

This chapter asks whether equal treatment of generations is compatible with social discounting. It presents the rank-discounted utilitarian criterion, proposed by Stéphane Zuber and analyzed in Zuber and Asheim (2010), which combines equal treatment with social discounting by giving priority for the worse off not only due to their absolute level of well-being but also their relative rank in wel...

Empirical evaluation of policies to mitigate climate change has been largely confined to the application of discounted utilitarianism (DU). DU is controversial, both due to the conditions through which it is justified and due to its consequences for climate policies, where the discounting of future utility gains from present abatement efforts makes it harder for such measures to justify their p...

We use a simple consumption model, the so-called cake eating model, to study the interaction of equity, time and risk in social decision making. Total consumption, the “cake,” is uncertain. The social planner allocates consumption between two agents (representing two generations), by assigning the first a determinate amount, with the second receiving the risky remainder. We study this consumpti...

Harsanyi claimed that his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems provide a justification for utilitarianism. This claim has been strongly resisted, notably by Sen and Weymark; the latter argue that Harsanyi has shown only that there exists a representation of the social preference ordering that is formally utilitarian in structure, not that utilitarianism itself is true. One prominent thre...

We analyze the implications of different welfare criteria on economic and population growth in the case of stochastic population change. Edgeworth (1925) argues that total utilitarianism leads to a lower economic performance and a larger population size than average utilitarianism. Following works show that while his intuition holds in a static framework, the result is unclear in a dynamic sett...

Debates over vaccine mandates raise intense emotions, as reflected in the current controversy over whether to mandate the vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV), the virus that can cause cervical cancer. Public health ethics so far has failed to facilitate meaningful dialogue between the opposing sides. When stripped of its emotional charge, the debate can be framed as a contest between co...

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