We show that, in a sufficiently large population satisfying certain statistical regularities, it is often possible to accurately estimate the utilitarian social welfare function, even if we only have very noisy data about individual utility functions and interpersonal utility comparisons. In particular, we show that it is often possible to identify an optimal or close-to-optimal utilitarian soc...

Philosophy can benefit from experiments performed in a laboratory for philosophical experimentation (SophoLab). To illustrate the power of Experimental Computational Philosophy, we set up and ran several experiments on a part of Harsanyi’s theory on utilitarianism. During decomposition and translation of this theory in the experimental setting of Sopholab, we discovered that it is underspecifie...

Peter Singer, in his essay "Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism" (Philosoohv and Public Affairs, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 325-37),1 has gone some distance toward clarifying his view of the utilitarian case for the ob­ ligation to be vegetarian. The fact that this clearer statement of his position was prompted, at least in part, by an essay of mine ("Utilitarianism, Vegetarianism, and Animal Rights," Phi...

Climate policies have stochastic consequences that involve a great number of generations. This calls for evaluating social risk (what kind of societies will future people be born into) rather than individual risk (what will happen to people during their own lifetimes). As a response we propose and axiomatize probability adjusted rank-discounted critical-level generalized utilitarianism (PARDCLU...

In public health ethics, as in bioethics, utilitarian approaches usually prevail, followed by Kantian and communitarian foundations. If one considers the nature and core functions of public health, which are focused on a population perspective, utilitarianism seems still more applicable to public health ethics. Nevertheless, faulting additional protections towards the human person, utilitariani...

In this paper I offer a defense of the view that judges should decide cases in accordance with act utilitarianism: i.e., in whatever way maximizes overall well-being. To advance this thesis, I first briefly give reasons for dissatisfaction with the commonsense thought that judges should just decide cases as the law requires. I then briefly argue for the claim that all moral agents, including ju...

Harsanyi [4, 5] develops expected utility theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern [21] to provide two formalizations of utilitarianism. Weymark [22, 23] refers to these results as Harsanyi’s Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems. In this paper, we are concerned only with Aggregation Theorem. Sen [6] argues that von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory is an ordinal theory and, theref...