Abstract Prioritarianism is a variant of utilitarianism. It differs from utilitarianism in that benefiting individuals matters more the worse off these are. On this view, there are two standard ways handling risky prospects: Ex-Post adjusts for prioritizing final outcomes and then values prospects by expectation sum total those adjusted values, whereas Ex-Ante on each individual's expectations....

The purpose of this study is to explore cross-cultural differences between U.S. and Chinese business students in their rationales for ethical decision-makingwith respect tocommon information-related ethical dilemmas. Wefound thatthe dimensions (i.e., moral equity, relativism, egoism, contractualism, and utilitarianism) of the multidimensional ethics scale (MES) had varying influences on the eth...

Why should we respect the privacy of donors of biological material? The question is answered in the present article in general philosophical terms from the point of view of an ethics of honour, a libertarian theory of rights, a view of respect for privacy based on the idea that autonomy is of value in itself, and utilitarianism respectively. For different reasons the ethics of honour and the id...

In any legal system, one finds numerous rules, practices, and constitutional provisions that are incompatible with utilitarian considerations. It is not merely utilitarianism that fails to explain a diverse range of rules and practices. Other theories that, like utilitarianism, involve ex ante considerations cannot explain them as well. There are two possible primary explanations for the preval...

I propose to show how to translate the economic analysis of institutions developed in the tradition of “worst case” political economy into the lingua franca of robust statistics. An institution will be defined as contingent upon a design theory and the difficulty we consider is the use of the institution by the designer. The technical bridge between institutional robustness and statistical robu...

Probability is a central concept in utilitarian moral theory, almost impossible to do without. I attempt to clarify the role of probability, so that we can be clear about what we are aiming for when we apply utilitarian theory to real cases. I point out the close relationship between utilitarianism and expected-utility theory, a normative standard for individual decision-making. I then argue th...

INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................512 I. GAGING THE RESPONSE TO HUMAN CLONING .................................517 A. Initial Reactions and Actions ........................................................517 B. Recent Attitudes Toward Human Cloning .....................................519 II. CAN A BAN ON HUMAN REPRODUCTIVE CLONING ...

Given a large enough population of voters whose utility functions satisfy certain statistical regularities, we show that voting rules such as the Borda rule, approval voting, and evaluative voting have a very high probability of selecting the social alternative which maximizes the utilitarian social welfare function. We also characterize the speed with which this probability approaches one as t...

A simple linear programming problem permits a brief and elementary proof of Harsanyi’s utilitarianism theorem: a Paretian social welfare function must be a weighted (affine) sum of individual utility functions when individual utilities and social welfare all take the Neumann–Morgenstern form. By adjusting the programming problem slightly, we conclude that the weights on individual utilities are...