Utilitarianism Is Implied by Social and Individual Dominance

Johan Gustafsson, Dean Spears () and Stéphane Zuber
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Dean Spears: University of Texas at Austin

No 16561, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The expectation of a sum of utilities is a core criterion for evaluating policies and social welfare under variable population and social risk. Our contribution 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.

Keywords: social risk; variable population; utilitarianism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2023-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
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Working Paper: Utilitarianism is Implied by Social and Individual Dominance (2023)
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