Can it be better or worse for a person to exist than not to exist at all? This old and challenging existential question has been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy, mainly for two reasons. First, traditional “impersonal” ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have counterintuitive implications in population ethics, for example, the repugnant conclusion. Second, it has seemed evident to many that an outcome can be better than another only if it is better for someone, and that only moral theories (...) that are in this sense “person affecting” can be correct. The implications of this Person-Affecting Restriction will differ radically, however, depending on which answer one gives to the existential question. The negative answer, which we argue against, would make the restriction quite untenable. Hence, many of the problems regarding our moral duties to future generations turn around the issue at hand. (shrink)

According to outcome welfarism, roughly, the value of an outcome is fundamentally a matterof the individual welfare it contains. I assess various suggestions as to how to spell out this idea more fully on the basis of some basic intuitions about the content and implications of welfarism. I point out that what are in fact different suggestions are often conflated and argue that none fully captures the basic intuitions. I then suggest that what this means is that different doctrines of (...) welfarism may be appropriate in different contexts and that when deciding on a particular doctrine, we need to consider which intuitions it does accommodate. Finally, I consider the issue of just how a benefit must be related to an outcome in order to contribute to its value. (shrink)

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, (...) we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources. (shrink)

Poverty indexes are essential for monitoring poverty, setting targets for poverty reduction, and tracking progress on these goals. This paper suggests that further justification is necessary for using the main poverty indexes in the literature in any of these ways. It does so by arguing that poverty should not decline with the mere addition of a rich person to a population and showing that the standard indexes do not satisfy this axiom. It, then, suggests a way of modifying these indexes (...) to avoid this problem. (shrink)

This essay introduces a new type of measure of social welfare, where populations are evaluated by their resemblance to an optimum population, which is an (in principle) possible population with the highest degree of social welfare, relative to some circumstances. Here it is argued to be the largest possible population where everyone fares maximally well. The new measure is responsive to quality of welfare, equality of welfare, and the number of people. It satisfies dominance and negative monotonicity, and it avoids (...) both the repugnant conclusion and a reverse repugnant conclusion for comparisons relative to our future on earth. (shrink)

The Levelling-Down Objection is a standard objection to monistic egalitarian theories where equality is the only thing that has intrinsic value. Most egalitarians, however, are value pluralists; they hold that, in addition to equality being intrinsically valuable, the egalitarian currency in which we are equal or unequal is also intrinsically valuable. In this paper, I shall argue that the Levelling-Down Objection still minimizes the weight that the intrinsic badness of inequality could have in the overall intrinsic evaluation of outcomes, given (...) a certain way of measuring the badness of inequality, namely, the Additive Individual-Complaints Measure. (shrink)

This paper examines how people assess inequality of income distribution and how inequality could be measured. We start from the philosophical analysis of Temkin, who distinguishes nine plausible aspects of inequality. His approach is based on the concept of ‘complaints’ or distances between incomes. We examine the Temkin approach by means of the questionnaire-experimental method pioneered by Amiel and Cowell to find out whether the aspects of equality have any plausibility for student respondents and, if so, whether there are aspects (...) which are more appealing than others. Both the numerical and verbal responses show that a considerable majority of the respondents might be influenced by the intuitions included in the combination of the Weighted Additive Principle and the Average view of complaints. The questionnaire results also shed some empirical light on the acceptance of the Transfer Principle and the attitudes towards the Sequence. Footnotes I would like to thank Erik Schokkaert, Frank Cowell, and Liema Davidovitz for various suggestions which have led to improvements in this paper. I am very grateful for helpful comments from seminar participants and an anonymous referee. I remain responsible for any remaining error. This paper was written while the author enjoyed the hospitality of Sticerd, LSE, London and he acknowledges the financial support provided by the Training and Mobility of Researchers Program of the European Communities, grant #ERBFMRXCT980248. (shrink)

According topositive egalitarianism, not only do relations of inequality have negative value, as negative egalitarians claim, but relations of equality also have positive value. The egalitarian value of a population is a function of both pairwise relations of inequality (negative) and pairwise relations of equality (positive). Positive andnegative egalitarianismdiverge, especially in different-number cases. Hence, an investigation of positive egalitarianism might shed new light on the vexed topic of population ethics and our duties to future generations. We shall here, in light (...) of some recent criticism, further develop the idea of giving positive value to equal relations. (shrink)