MR. LESLIE STEPHEN ON UTILITARIANISM

A Critical Reflection on Utilitarianism as the Basis for Psychiatric Ethics Part II: Utilitarianism and Psychiatry

Whilst many factors influence its craft, psychiatry is ultimately considered a profession. Any medical practitioner abides by a social contract as both a healer and professional (ABIM Foundation, ACP-ASIM Foundation, & EFIM, 2002). Physicians have reaffirmed the concept of medicine as a profession, in the face of commercialization of healthcare, globalization and advances in biotechnology. Crue...

Stephen Neale ON REPRESENTING

O thoughts, utterances, and inscriptions are taken by many philosophers to have content in virtue of being representations of reality. Such representations can be accurate or inaccurate: those that are accurate are said to be true, to correspond to the facts, to mirror reality (nature, the world). Donald Davidson finds such talk unfortunate: it is thoroughly intertwined with talk of facts, coun...

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...

Utilitarianism, Conscience and Animals