Rule-Utilitarianism

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

Money-metric utilitarianism

We discuss a method of ranking allocations in economic environments which applies when we do not know the names or preferences of individual agents. We require that two allocations can be ranked with the knowledge only of their aggregate bundles and community indifference sets–a condition we refer to as aggregate independence. We also postulate a basic Pareto and continuity property, and a prop...

Perspectival Act Utilitarianism

This chapter works within a particular framework for reasoning about actions – sometimes known as the framework of “stit semantics” – originally due to Belnap and Perloff, based ultimately on the theory of indeterminism set out in Prior’s indeterministic tense logic, and developed in full detail by Belnap et al. (2001). The issues I want to consider arise when certain normative, or decision the...