A Fairness Justification of Utilitarianism

Paolo Giovanni Piacquadio

Econometrica, 2017, vol. 85, 1261-1276

Abstract: Differences in preferences are important to explain variation in individuals' behavior. There is, however, no consensus on how to take these differences into account when evaluating policies. While prominent in the economic literature, the standard utilitarian criterion is controversial. According to some, interpersonal comparability of utilities involves value judgments with little objective basis. Others argue that social justice is primarily about the distribution of commodities assigned to individuals, rather than their subjective satisfaction or happiness. In this paper, we propose and axiomatically characterize a criterion, named opportunity‐equivalent utilitarian, that addresses these claims. First, our criterion ranks social alternatives on the basis of individuals' ordinal preferences. Second, it compares individuals based on the fairness of their assignments. Opportunity‐equivalent utilitarianism requires society to maximize the sum of specific indices of well‐being that are cardinal, interpersonally comparable, and represent each individual's preferences.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/

Related works:
Working Paper: A Fairness Justification of Utilitarianism (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:emetrp:v:85:y:2017:i::p:1261-1276

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.economet ... ordering-back-issues

Access Statistics for this article

Econometrica is currently edited by Guido W. Imbens

More articles in Econometrica from Econometric Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().