Figure 2 - uploaded by David Donaldson
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
This article examines several families of population principles in the light of a set of axioms. In addition to the critical-level utilitarian, number-sensitive critical-level utilitarian, and number-dampened utilitarian families and their generalized counterparts, we consider the restricted number-dampened family and introduce two new ones: the re...
Similar publications
An attempt is made to evaluate the performance of several distribution mechanisms, using experimental data on ethical judgements. Among the mechanisms examined are the competitive equilibrium with equal incomes, utilitarianism, the maximin, and several mechanisms based on bargaining. Also studied is the extent to which differences in needs, in tast...
This paper challenges the view of Jeremy Bentham as a primitive predecessor of rational choice theory and welfare economics. The psychological hedonism in Bentham is of a rather weak form – net pleasure motivates behaviour, but we are not always capable of its maximisation. Thus, the outcome of our choices is not necessarily in our best interest an...
Actions to help those who are in an extreme situation fall within supererogatory acts, i.e. "it would be better" to occur, but the inaction is not sanctioned, "not wrong." The two phrases, "right" and "wrong" applies the same people in the same circumstances, with the same obligations. In this paper I will try to determine the moral value of the su...
This study explored the relationship between leadership style and individual ethics in work groups. We present a model of how active leadership affects conformity in members’ ethical decision frameworks (formalism and utilitarianism). We tested this model by examining 36 work groups over a 12-week period. Results supported the hypothesis that more...
The development of effective means to enhance research integrity by universities requires baseline measures of individual, programmatic, and institutional factors known to contribute to ethical decision making and behavior. In the present study, master's thesis and Ph.D. students in the fields of biological, health and social sciences at a research...
Citations
... Building upon the work of Dalton (1920) and others (Arrow, 1965;Pratt, 1964), Atkinson's research showed how the concavity of a utility function provides not only a basis for illustration of how the 'principle of transfers' holds, but also allows for quantification of the degree of inequality in an income distribution. Subsequently, strictly concave transformation has been employed in a diverse range of settings including behavioural economics (Cox & Sadiraj, 2006), health economics (Blackorby et al., 2003;Broome, 1993), the economics of education (Ooghe, 2021), and the economics of climate change (Adler & Treich, 2015). ...
Health spillovers arise when an individual's serious illness affects those close to them emotionally, psychologically, and/or physically. As a result, healthcare interventions that improve the lives of patients may also confer wider health benefits. However, contrary to widespread calls for health spillovers to be included in health economic evaluation, others have argued this could have adverse distributional consequences and equity implications. This paper presents a novel approach to spillover inclusion in health economic evaluation using a ‘prioritarian transformation’ of health gains that allows these equity concerns to be addressed. Affording greater weight to the incremental change in patient outcomes when incorporating carer/family health spillovers into resource allocation decisions, the method provides a feasible means of moderating the distributional impact of spillover inclusion. It also introduces a normative, theoretical perspective to a largely empirical extant literature and, as such, its axiomatic basis is examined. Finally, an illustrative example of the approach is presented to demonstrate its application.
... Classical or total utilitarianism says we should choose the option that maximizes the sum of (expected) utilities [3]. The options are eligible world histories, the sum runs over all possible individuals (i e. individuals who exist in at least one eligible world history) and the (expected) utility of an individual in a world history is a real-valued number that measures the (expected) personal value of the life of that individual in that world history. ...
... The options are eligible world histories, the sum runs over all possible individuals (i e. individuals who exist in at least one eligible world history) and the (expected) utility of an individual in a world history is a real-valued number that measures the (expected) personal value of the life of that individual in that world history. The utility can be a concave function of welfare or lifetime well-being, in which case we have a prioritarian or generalized utilitarian theory [3]: we have to improve everyone's lifetime well-being, giving priority to the worst-off people who have the lowest levels of lifetime well-being [5,19]. If the option involves uncertain outcomes (different world histories having certain probabilities), the utility can be represented as an expected value over the possible outcomes. ...
... Finally, such preferences do not satisfy the axiom of "existence Independence of unconcerned Individuals," so that rankings of alternatives may depend on the utilities of unaffected people such as the long dead. See Blackorby, Bossert, and Donaldson (2001). For other approaches, see, for example, Lagerlöf (2015). ...
In this study we propose a framework based on welfarist principles to deal with several issues concerned with population economics models, such as the Repugnant Conclusion, both in absolute and relative sense, the shape of childbearing costs and population dynamics, under both normative and positive perspectives. We show that the relative critical level criterion can avoid both the assumption of high childbearing costs and the absolute repugnant conclusion (ARC) but cannot avoid the relative repugnant conclusion (RRC). Moreover, optimal fertility is increased by technological shocks and displays cycles. Both ARC and RRC can be avoided by extending the model to a decentralized economy with consumption externalities; in the latter model, a technological shock reduces long‐run fertility and can generate cycles along the transitional path.
... This difficulty extends beyond CU and CLU. Blackorby, Bossert, and Donaldson (2003) propose a list of reasonable properties and show that there is no welfarist social choice rule which satisfies all of these properties. 1 Ng (1989) and Arrhenius (2000) report similarly negative results. The present paper provides a new perspective on this conundrum. ...
... At the very least, the strength or weakness of these restrictions could provide some insight into how serious the problem is. Blackorby et al. (2002b and 2003) show that, of 13 welfarist social choice rules examined, only classical generalized utilitarianism and critical-level generalized utilitarianism satisfy a truncated version of their list of desirable properties . 2 Therefore, it seems reasonable to focus attention on these two rules. At the same time, Blackorby and Donaldson (1982) demonstrate the severe restrictions on the generalized form which result from the need to accommodate negative utilities in an informational environment where the origin is socially meaningful. ...
The paper investigates the problem of the repugnant conclusion in variable-population social choice. A choice rule exhibits the repugnant conclusion if, given any alternative in which all individuals enjoy a high quality of life, there is always a better alternative (according to the choice rule) in which the population is larger and each individual has a life which is barely worth living. While it is well-known that classical utilitarianism (CU) exhibits the repugnant conclusion on an unrestricted domain, the paper shows that critical-level utilitarianism (CLU) also exhibits the repugnant conclusion on an unrestricted domain when repugnance is defined in terms of the critical level. In contrast, both CU and CLU are shown to avoid the repugnant conclusion on a restricted domain defined by bounded resources, the law of conservation of matter, concavity and monotonicity of preferences, positive subsistence consumption, and positive "neutral consumption." In light of the universality of these restrictions, one may conclude that the problem of the repugnant conclusion may not be as great as previously thought. Copyright © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc..
... If all critical levels exist, all same-number generalized-utilitarian principles with some negative critical levels are similarly ruled out. These include the number-dampened utilitarian principles (Ng [1986]) other than classical utilitarianism and their generalized counterparts (see Blackorby, Bossert and Donaldson [2003]). ...
... However, all of the others that do necessarily violate existence independence. Because space constraints prevent us from examining them here, we refer the interested reader to Blackorby, Bossert and Donaldson [2003]. ...
Public policies frequently involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to assess the corresponding feasible choices on normative grounds, criteria for social evaluation that are capable of ranking alternatives with different populations and population sizes are required.
... There are principles that are closely related to the critical-level generalized-utilitarian principles with positive critical levels. They are the restricted critical-level generalizedutilitarian principles (Blackorby, Bossert and Donaldson [2001]) and they satisfy anonymity, strong Pareto, continuity and weak existence of critical levels and, furthermore, they avoid both the repugnant conclusion and the strong sadistic conclusion. The positive critical level for a critical-level generalized-utilitarian principle becomes the critical-level parameter for the corresponding restricted principle. ...
Critical-level generalized-utilitarian population principles with positive critical levels pro-vide an ethically attractive way of avoiding the repugnant conclusion. We discuss the axiomatic foundations of critical-level generalized utilitarianism and investigate its rela-tionship to the sadistic and strong sadistic conclusions. A positive critical level avoids the repugnant conclusion. We demonstrate that, although no critical-level generalized-utilitarian principle can avoid both the repugnant and strong sadistic conclusions, princi-ples that avoid both have significant defects.
In this essay I argue that even though egalitarianism and prioritarianism are different theories of social welfare, they can use the same social welfare measures. I present six different arguments for this thesis. The first argument is that conceptual connections between egalitarianism and prioritarianism ensure that any measure that works for either theory works for both. The second argument is that conditions necessary and sufficient to identify egalitarian and prioritarian measures, respectively, are equivalent. The third argument is that both egalitarianism and prioritarianism can use two standard measures, typically proposed for only one theory. The fourth to sixth arguments contend that four properties that have been proposed as distinctive of either egalitarian or prioritarian measures cannot distinguish between them. I conclude that any egalitarian measure is also a prioritarian measure, and vice versa.
This essay introduces a new type of measure of social welfare, where populations are evaluated by their resemblance to an optimum population, which is an (in principle) possible population with the highest degree of social welfare, relative to some circumstances. Here it is argued to be the largest possible population where everyone fares maximally well. The new measure is responsive to quality of welfare, equality of welfare, and the number of people. It satisfies dominance and negative monotonicity, and it avoids both the repugnant conclusion and a reverse repugnant conclusion for comparisons relative to our future on earth.
I argue for the principle of Anonymity, according to which two populations are equally good whenever they have the same anonymous distribution of wellbeing. I first show that, given transitivity of the at-least-as-good-as relation, Anonymity is entailed by the ``Non-Identity Principle'', according to which the consequence of bringing better rather than worse lives into existence is, all else equal, better. I then argue for the Non-Identity Principle on the basis that if it were false, it would follow that we fail to improve the world when we make existing people better off, while at the same time replacing worse-off future people with different better-off future people. Since this is implausible, we should accept the Non-Identity Principle, and therefore Anonymity as well.
