Utilitarianism Reformed

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...

The Reformed Public House

Has the Carlisle scheme of State ownership and control, which Mr. Dering advocates, resulted in a greater decrease in drunkenness than is seen in places where licensed premises are still privately owned ? The evidence does not support such a contention. Increased sobriety is, one is glad to know, practically universal, but statistics indicate that Carlisle shows no greater increase than the gen...

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...