Discounting, Beyond Utilitarianism

No . 060 - 2014 Discounting , beyond utilitarianism * January 2014

Discounted utilitarianism and the Ramsey equation prevail in the debate on the discount rate on consumption. The utility discount rate is assumed to be constant and to reflect either the uncertainty about the existence of future generations or a pure preference for the present. We question the unique status of discounted utilitarianism and discuss the implications of alternative criteria addres...

Beyond Time Discounting

The intertemporal tradeoffs made by most persons appear inconsistent when viewed through the lens of the standard time-discounting model. At different times and in different decision contexts, the same individual will often display behavior suggestive of a wide range of discount rates, from strongly positive (indicative of a lack of concern of future consequences) to strongly negative (implying...

Beyond "utilitarianism": maximizing the clinical impact of moral judgment research.

The use of hypothetical moral dilemmas--which pit utilitarian considerations of welfare maximization against emotionally aversive "personal" harms--has become a widespread approach for studying the neuropsychological correlates of moral judgment in healthy subjects, as well as in clinical populations with social, cognitive, and affective deficits. In this article, we propose that a refinement o...

Utilitarianism and Personal Identity

Statistical utilitarianism

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...