Doesn’t this all depend on assuming we are trying maximize average happiness? That seems like a very questionable assumption to me. Rawls argued against it explicitly, for example. He phrased his arguments in terms of “fairness” and there are nice links here to the relationship between happiness and comparison to others. The mathematical implication is we need some more sophisticated function which maps the distribution to a scalar. And then of course there are the non-consumption variables. If you’re a well fed woman who is married to the man who raped you (see e.g. the issues surrounding article 308 of the Jordan criminal code) I don’t think total consumption is what matters to you...
Doesn’t this all depend on assuming we are trying maximize average happiness? That seems like a very questionable assumption to me. Rawls argued against it explicitly, for example. He phrased his arguments in terms of “fairness” and there are nice links here to the relationship between happiness and comparison to others. The mathematical implication is we need some more sophisticated function which maps the distribution to a scalar. And then of course there are the non-consumption variables. If you’re a well fed woman who is married to the man who raped you (see e.g. the issues surrounding article 308 of the Jordan criminal code) I don’t think total consumption is what matters to you...