BACKGROUND Unweighted summation or quality-adjusted life year (QALY) utilitarianism is the most common way to aggregate health benefits in a cost-effectiveness analysis. A key qualitative principle underlying QALY utilitarianism is separability: those individuals unaffected by a policy choice should not influence the policy choice. Separability also underlies several of the alternatives for QAL...

Utilitarianism is the most prominent family of social welfare functions. We present three new axiomatic characterizations utilitarian (that is, additively separable) functions in a setting where there risk over both population size and welfares individuals. First, we show that, given uncontroversial basic axioms, Blackorby et al.'s (1998) Expected Critical-Level Generalized (ECLGU) equivalent t...

A growing body of work suggests that religiosity is typically associated with deontological or non-utilitarian moral judgments. However, recent conceptualizations utilitarian psychology show instrumental harm just one (negative) dimension utilitarianism. In the new two-dimensional model psychology, impartial beneficence second (positive) current study, we investigated relationship between centr...

Translational medicine is a rather new research area, as it was mentioned for the first time in 1996, in the PubMed publication index, while bearing as a motto “From bench to bedside”. Its complexity and novelty manage to raise a series of problems, in both medical and bioethical terms. The intricacy of translational medicine resides in the implication of several related research areas, such as...

R.M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism provides a useful framework for understanding the evolution of codes of professional ethics. From a Harean perspective, the codes reflect both the fact that members of various professions face special kinds of ethically charged situations in the normal course of their work, and the need for people in special roles to acquire various habits of thought and act...

Given n agents with who wish to divide m commodities, consider the n-person noncooperative game with strategies consisting of concave increasing utility functions, and whose outcomes are the relative utilitarian solution. Any constrained equal-income competitive equilibrium allocation for the true utilities is shown to ba a Nash equilibrium outcome for the noncooperative game. Conditions are pr...

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under utilitarianism is equality of incomes. JEL classification: H0, I0, I30, I31

In the operation of a health care system, defining the limits of medical care is the joint responsibility of many parties including clinicians, patients, philosophers and politicians. It is suggested that changes in the potential for prolonging life make it necessary to give doctors guidance which may have to incorporate certain features of utilitarianism, individualism and patient-autonomy.