Utilitarianism and Discrimination

Alon Harel () and Uzi Segal

No 797, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: Since Becker (1971), a common argument against asymmetric norms that promote minority rights over those of the majority is that such policies reduce total welfare. While this may be the case, we show that there are simple environments where aggregate sum of individual utilities is actually maximized under asymmetric norms that favor minorities. We thus maintain that without information regarding individual utilities one cannot reject or promote segregation-related policies based on utilitarian arguments.

Keywords: Utilitarianism; discrimination; segregation; minority and majority rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-02-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-mic and nep-ure
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Journal Article: Utilitarianism and discrimination (2014)
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