Thanks for all this! I agree that something like Nash is appealing for a bunch of reasons. Not least because it’s Pareto efficient, so doesn’t screw people over for the greater good, which feels more politically legitimate. It is also principled, in that it doesn’t require some social planner to decide how to weigh people’s preferences or wellbeing.
My sense, though you know much more about all this, is that Nash bargaining is not well described as a variant of utilitarianism, though I case it’s a grey area.
Maybe I’m realising now that a lot of the action in your argument is not in arguing for the values which guide the future to be democratically chosen, but rather in thikning through which kinds of democratic mechanisms are best. Where plain old majority rule seems very unappealing, but more granular approaches which give more weight to those who care most about a given issue look much better. And (here we agree) this is especially important if you think that the wrong kind of popular future, such as a homogenous majority-determined future, could fall far short of the best future.
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.
Thanks for all this! I agree that something like Nash is appealing for a bunch of reasons. Not least because it’s Pareto efficient, so doesn’t screw people over for the greater good, which feels more politically legitimate. It is also principled, in that it doesn’t require some social planner to decide how to weigh people’s preferences or wellbeing.
My sense, though you know much more about all this, is that Nash bargaining is not well described as a variant of utilitarianism, though I case it’s a grey area.
Maybe I’m realising now that a lot of the action in your argument is not in arguing for the values which guide the future to be democratically chosen, but rather in thikning through which kinds of democratic mechanisms are best. Where plain old majority rule seems very unappealing, but more granular approaches which give more weight to those who care most about a given issue look much better. And (here we agree) this is especially important if you think that the wrong kind of popular future, such as a homogenous majority-determined future, could fall far short of the best future.
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.