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, USA. IZA, Germany. IFFS, Sweden. GPI, Oxford University, UK

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

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 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

Keywords: Social risk; variable population; utilitarianism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
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http://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2023/23016.pdf (application/pdf)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04319374

Related works:
Working Paper: Utilitarianism Is Implied by Social and Individual Dominance (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mse:cesdoc:23016

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