Infinite Population Utilitarian Criteria

On the leximin and utilitarian overtaking criteria with extended anonymity

This paper studies the extensions of the infinte-horizon variants of the leximin principle and utilitarianism on the set of infinite utility streams. We especially examine those extensions which satisfy the axiom of Preference-continuity (or Consistency) and the extended anonymity axiom called Q-Anonymity. We formulate new extended leximin and utilitarian social welfare relations (SWRs), called...

Infinite Population GA Tutorial

Utilitarian Harm 1 Running Head: UTILITARIAN HARM Authority Dependence and Judgments of Utilitarian Harm

Three studies tested the conditions under which people judge utilitarian harm to be authority dependent (i.e., whether its right or wrongness depends on the ruling of an authority). In Study 1, participants judged the right or wrongness of physical abuse when used as an interrogation method anticipated to yield useful information for preventing future terrorist attacks. The ruling of the milita...

On the Extension of the Utilitarian and Suppes-Sen Social Welfare Relations to Infinite Utility Streams

Extensions of a utilitarian and a Suppes–Sen grading principle defined on infinite utility streams are characterized with a stronger notion of Anonymity and without any consistency postulate. The relative merits of the Extended Utilitarian relation are discussed and its rankings are compared with those of the overtaking criterion and the Basu–Mitra Utilitarian relation.

Utilitarian epistemology

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promi...