Huh, I mean it just is formally equivalent to the sum of log utilities in the bargaining situation! But “utilitarianism” is fuzzy :)
Yes, the idea of finding a preference aggregation mechanism that does much better than modern electoral systems at capturing the cardinality of societal preferences is, I think, really core to what I’m doing here, so I probably should have brought this out a bit more than I did!
Yeah, fair! I guess there’s a broad understanding of utilitarianism, which is “the sum of any monotone or non-decreasing transformation of utilities”, and a narrower understanding, which is “the sum of utilities”. But I want to say that prioritarianism (a version of the former) is an alternative to utilitarianism, not a variant. Not actually sure what prioritarians would say. Also not really an important point to argue about.
Makes sense! There’s some old writers in the utilitarian tradition like James Griffin that define utilitarianism in the broader way, but I do think your articulation is probably more common.
Huh, I mean it just is formally equivalent to the sum of log utilities in the bargaining situation! But “utilitarianism” is fuzzy :)
Yes, the idea of finding a preference aggregation mechanism that does much better than modern electoral systems at capturing the cardinality of societal preferences is, I think, really core to what I’m doing here, so I probably should have brought this out a bit more than I did!
Yeah, fair! I guess there’s a broad understanding of utilitarianism, which is “the sum of any monotone or non-decreasing transformation of utilities”, and a narrower understanding, which is “the sum of utilities”. But I want to say that prioritarianism (a version of the former) is an alternative to utilitarianism, not a variant. Not actually sure what prioritarians would say. Also not really an important point to argue about.
Glad to have highlighted the cardinality point!
Makes sense! There’s some old writers in the utilitarian tradition like James Griffin that define utilitarianism in the broader way, but I do think your articulation is probably more common.