Contractarian Ethics and Harsanyi’s Two Justifications of Utilitarianism
نویسنده
چکیده
Harsanyi defends utilitarianism by means of an axiomatic proof and by what he calls the ‘equiprobability model’. Both justifications of utilitarianism aim to show that utilitarian ethics can be derived from Bayesian rationality and some weak moral constraints on the reasoning of rational agents. I argue that, from the perspective of Bayesian agents, one of these constraints, the impersonality constraint, is not weak at all if its meaning is made precise and that generally it even contradicts individual rational agency. Without the impersonality constraint, Harsanyi’s two justifications of utilitarianism on the grounds of Bayesian rationality fail. As an alternative, I develop a contractarian framework that is compatible with individual rational agency and Harsanyi’s central assumptions, and that allows the derivation of moral conclusions on the grounds of Bayesian rationality. The developed framework offers a novel justification of contractarian ethics and may best be described as a combined version of Harsanyi’s equiprobability model and Rawls’s original position.
منابع مشابه
Deontology – Born and Kept in Servitude by Utilitarianism
The distinction between teleology and deontology is today almost universally accepted within practical philosophy, but deontology is and has from the beginning been subordinate to utilitarianism. ‘Deontology’ was constructed by Bentham to signify the art and science of private morality within a utilitarian worldview. The classical distinction was constructed by Broad as a refinement of Sidgwick...
متن کاملMeasurement-Theoretic Foundations of Preference Aggregation Logic for Weighted Utilitarianism
Harsanyi [4, 5] develops expected utility theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern [21] to provide two formalizations of utilitarianism. Weymark [22, 23] refers to these results as Harsanyi’s Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems. In this paper, we are concerned only with Aggregation Theorem. Sen [6] argues that von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory is an ordinal theory and, theref...
متن کاملHarsanyi’s utilitarianism via linear programming
A simple linear programming problem permits a brief and elementary proof of Harsanyi’s utilitarianism theorem: a Paretian social welfare function must be a weighted (affine) sum of individual utility functions when individual utilities and social welfare all take the Neumann–Morgenstern form. By adjusting the programming problem slightly, we conclude that the weights on individual utilities are...
متن کاملA Reformulation of the Axiomatic Foundations of Relative Utilitarianism
We consider the aggregation of individual agents’ von Neumann-Morgenstern’s utility functions into a societal von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function. We start from Harsanyi’s [7] axiomatization of utilitarianism, and ask under which conditions a social preference order that satisfies Harsanyi’s axiom uniquely reveals society’s marginal rates of substitution between the probabilities of any tw...
متن کامل