Utilitarianism is Implied by Social and Individual Dominance - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société Accéder directement au contenu
Autre Publication Scientifique Documents de travail du Centre d'Économie de la Sorbonne Année : 2023

Utilitarianism is Implied by Social and Individual Dominance

Résumé

The expectation of a sum of utilities is a core criterion for evaluating policies and social welfare under variable population and social risk. Our innovation is to show that a previously unrecognized combination of weak assumptions yields general versions of this criterion, both in fixed-population and in variable-population settings. We show that two dimensions of weak dominance (over risk and individuals) characterize a social welfare function with two dimensions of additive separability. So social expected utility emerges merely from social statewise dominance (given other axioms). Moreover, additive utilitarianism, in the variable-population setting, arises from a new, weak form of individual stochastic dominance with two attractive properties: It only applies to lives certain to exist (so it does not compare life against non-existence), and it avoids prominent egalitarian objections to utilitarianism by only applying if certain correlations are preserved. Our result provides a foundation for evaluating climate change, growth, and depopulation.
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halshs-04319374 , version 1 (07-12-2023)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-04319374 , version 1

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Johan E Gustafsson, Dean Spears, Stéphane Zuber. Utilitarianism is Implied by Social and Individual Dominance. 2023. ⟨halshs-04319374⟩
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