Utilitarianism does not dominate: a response to Chung

Ryuto Shibata and David Wiens

Economics and Philosophy, 2026, vol. 42, issue 3, _11

Abstract: Chung (2023) purports to derive conditions under which a Utilitarian society, which maximizes total welfare, Pareto dominates a Rawlsian society, which maximizes the income of the least advantaged members of society. We show that Chung’s analysis is doubly flawed. First, his analysis assumes that a Rawlsian government chooses an inefficient tax rate when it could do otherwise. Second, his analysis violates his assumption that citizens must choose a non-negative amount of labour. We show that Chung’s headline result does not hold once we enforce this assumption.

Date: 2026
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