If humans subject animals to painful, damaging, or frightening procedures to achieve scientific progress, then the very least that humankind can do is to insist that regulations be put in place to protect animals and that they be properly implemented and enforced. However, recent practice in the United Kingdom suggests that this is not the case. Europe’s new regime on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes—Directive 2010/63—must act as a catalyst for significant change and is a significant recognition (...) of the intrinsic value of animals. Before this Directive, the cost/benefit analysis undertaken in the United Kingdom allowed for a large margin of error so that animal welfare was an aggregated concept, and any aggregated finding of “adequate” animal welfare was not militated by individual cases of exacerbated animal detriment. The recognition that each animal has value as an individual means that the levels of animal welfare or protection expected of scientific establishments can no longer simply be those that are, in generic terms, appropriate for the aggregated mass of animals. Instead, the welfare standards applied are appropriate and rendered effectual for all individual animals. (shrink)

The article shows that a Paretian social welfare function can be history independent and time consistent only if a stringent set of conditions is verified. Individual utilities must be additive. The social welfare function must be a linear combination of these utilities. Social preferences are stationary only if, in addition, all individuals have the same constant discount rate. The results are implemented in two frameworks: deterministic dynamic choice and dynamic choice under uncertainty. The applications highlight that the conditions (...) are unlikely to be met by individual preferences, and that they severely restrict social preferences. (shrink)

Most accounts of welfare aggregation in the tradition of Arrow's and Sen's social-choice-theoretic frameworks represent the welfare of an individual in terms of a single welfare ordering or a single scalar-valued welfare function. I develop a multidimensional generalization of Arrow's and Sen's frameworks, representing individual welfare in terms of multiple personal welfare functions, corresponding to multiple 'dimensions' of welfare. I show that, as in the one-dimensional case, the existence of attractive aggregation (...) procedures depends on certain informational assumptions, specifically about the measurability of welfare and its comparability not only across individuals but also across dimensions. I state several impossibility and possibility results. Under Arrow-type conditions, insufficient comparability across individuals leads to dictatorship of a single individual, while insufficient comparability across dimensions leads to dominance of a single dimension. Given sufficient comparability both across individuals and across dimensions, a range of possibilities emerges. I discuss the substantive implications of the results. (shrink)

This paper is about the role of interpersonal comparisons in Harsanyi's aggregation theorem. Harsanyi interpreted his theorem to show that a broadly utilitarian theory of distribution must be true even if there are no interpersonal comparisons of well-being. How is this possible? The orthodox view is that it is not. Some argue that the interpersonal comparability of well-being is hidden in Harsanyi's premises. Others argue that it is a surprising conclusion of Harsanyi's theorem, which is not presupposed by any (...) one of the premises. I argue instead that Harsanyi was right: his theorem and its weighted-utilitarian conclusion do not require interpersonal comparisons of well-being. The key to making sense of this possibility is to treat Harsanyi's weights as dimensional constants rather than dimensionless numbers. (shrink)

Determining appropriate authorship recognition in student-faculty collaborative research is a complex task. In this quantitative study, responses from 1346 students and faculty in education and some social science disciplines at 36 research-intensive institutions in the United States were analyzed to provide a description of current and recommended practices for authorship in student-faculty collaborative research. The responses revealed practices and perceptions that are not aligned with ethical guidelines and a lack of consensus among respondents about appropriate practice. Faculty and student respondents (...) agreed that students deserve more authorship recognition than they get in common practice but they did not agree on the appropriate authorship arrangement for several of the collaborative scenarios described in the study or on the relative value of various contributions to research projects. The misalignment with ethical codes and lack of consensus among the respondents is problematic because student-faculty collaborative research is common and authored publications are powerful indicators of research competency. With these detailed results, students and faculty can better anticipate areas where their perspectives are likely to differ and faculty can work to clarify ambiguous expectations. (shrink)

The principle of Anteriority says that prospects that are identical from the perspective of every possible person’s welfare are equally good overall. The principle enjoys prima facie plausibility, and has been employed for various theoretical purposes. Here it is shown using an analogue of the St Petersburg Paradox that Anteriority is inconsistent with central principles of axiology.

The new field of judgment aggregation aims to merge many individual sets of judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a single collective set of judgments on these propositions. Judgment aggregation has commonly been studied using classical propositional logic, with a limited expressive power and a problematic representation of conditional statements ("if P then Q") as material conditionals. In this methodological paper, I present a simple unified model of judgment aggregation in general logics. I show how many realistic (...) decision problems can be represented in it. This includes decision problems expressed in languages of classical propositional logic, predicate logic (e.g. preference aggregation problems), modal or conditional logics, and some multi-valued or fuzzy logics. I provide a list of simple tools for working with general logics, and I prove impossibility results that generalise earlier theorems. (shrink)

The Kantian theory of private law, as Ernest Weinrib and Arthur Ripstein have developed it over the last two decades, is based on a fundamental normative truth, viz., no person is subordinate or superior to another person. Kantians construe any attempt to understand and justify the distribution of the rights-claims and rights-liberties that constitute private law in terms of aggregate welfare and/or distributive justice, as a deep category mistake. This essay outlines a ‘semi-Kantian’ theory of private law, which is (...) like Kant’s in that it understands private law as a means of instituting and protecting private freedom. Yet, semi-Kantians insist that the choice between different private law programs, which respect private freedom equally well, can at times be justified by considerations of aggregate welfare and distributive justice, as well as other considerations that concern the impact on society as a whole. (shrink)

Standard impossibility theorems on judgment aggregation over logically connected propositions either use a controversial systematicity condition or apply only to agendas of propositions with rich logical connections. Are there any serious impossibilities without these restrictions? We prove an impossibility theorem without requiring systematicity that applies to most standard agendas: Every judgment aggregation function (with rational inputs and outputs) satisfying a condition called unbiasedness is dictatorial (or effectively dictatorial if we remove one of the agenda conditions). Our agenda conditions (...) are tight. When applied illustratively to (strict) preference aggregation represented in our model, the result implies that every unbiased social welfare function with universal domain is effectively dictatorial. (shrink)

In preference aggregation a set of individuals express preferences over a set of alternatives, and these preferences have to be aggregated into a collective preference. When preferences are represented as orders, aggregation procedures are called social welfare functions. Classical results in social choice theory state that it is impossible to aggregate the preferences of a set of individuals under different natural sets of axiomatic conditions. We define a first-order language for social welfare functions and we give (...) a complete axiomatisation for this class, without having the number of individuals or alternatives specified in the language. We are able to express classical axiomatic requirements in our first-order language, giving formal axioms for three classical theorems of preference aggregation by Arrow, by Sen, and by Kirman and Sondermann. We explore to what extent such theorems can be formally derived from our axiomatisations, obtaining positive results for Sen’s Theorem and the Kirman-Sondermann Theorem. For the case of Arrow’s Theorem, which does not apply in the case of infinite societies, we have to resort to fixing the number of individuals with an additional axiom. In the long run, we hope that our approach to formalisation can serve as the basis for a fully automated proof of classical and new theorems in social choice theory. (shrink)

An important debate in the reasoning literature concerns the extent to which inference processes are domain-free or domain-specific. Typically, evidence in support of the domain-specific position comprises the facilitation observed when abstract reasoning tasks are set in realistic context. Three experiments are reported here in which the sources of facilitation were investigated for contextualised versions of Raven's Progressive Matrices (Richardson, 1991) and non-verbal analogies from the AH4 test (Richardson & Webster, 1996). Experiment 1 confirmed that the facilitation observed for the (...) contextualised matrices was in part due to extraneous aspects of commentaries originally intended to activate domainspecific processes. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that the remainder of the facilitation for the matrices, and all of the facilitation for the analogies, could be explained by visual salience: Converting the item elements into realistic objects had enabled them and their transitions to be identified more easily. Hence, performance at simplified abstract items was as good as, or better than, at contextualised items. It is concluded that facilitation effects cannot be interpreted as showing that domain-specific processes constitute a self-contained system separate from domain-free processes. In turn, this means that domain-free processes cannot be dismissed as being unimportant for reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 99-102 [Access article in PDF] Living with Contested Knowledge and Partial Jennifer Clegg and Richard Lansdall-Welfare THESE CAREFUL AND CONSTRUCTIVE comments bring grist to our mill. Before responding to them, we observe first that they offer no substantive challenge to our thesis: ambiguities associated with meaning in the disabled life make it more likely that professional service providers will make dogmatic responses (...) to bereavement, and perhaps other essentially contested topics, responses that are defended by isolationism.Some welcome ideas came from left field to refresh our thinking, such as Colman's observations on the gendered nature of care. She reminded us that although the audit from which these cases came was established to investigate bereavement in general among adults with intellectual disability, its rough and ready sampling failed to ensure the expected range of bereavement types. Somehow the bereavements constructed as relevant for audit all transpired to concern the death of mothers. Moreover, of the six relatives who agreed to be interviewed concerning these bereavements, two were stepfathers and four were sisters. Colman underlines the invisibility of care work usually done by female family members: how wise or less wise decisions create the conditions for bereavement reactions, and how changes to care arrangements following bereavement fall most heavily on them. Traustadottir (2002) discussed the way new care initiatives often put pressure on female family members and staff to do more unpaid work. For example, Circles of Support encourages them to include people with intellectual disability in their personal social networks, without considering the personal costs. Such observations have yet to emerge from the umbrella of feminist research. Separatism has served feminism well, but issues of women and care do need to find their place in mainstream reviews.Another useful reminder from Colman is that the person with intellectual disability is not the only concern to families, although only a few adult services manage to hold wider systemic factors in mind (Clegg and Burnham 2000). If the person may make naïve comments at a funeral that would devastate family members whose needs take priority, the person will be excluded.The potency of bereavement was discussed twice. Casenave suggests that because "disability is a loss experience" bereavement resonates with it, casting some doubt onto the suggestion that our thesis generalizes to other contested topics. Reinders criticizes clinicians for being purblind to the tragic. The anonymous reviewer who questioned [End Page 99] the relevance of our discussion of the quality of "presence," a quality Reinders considers highly relevant, illustrates the point better than we can. Recognizing the way clinicians have little "patience with the notion of the tragic" encourages reflection on what other human experiences fail to capture our attention.Although these are all potentially valuable directions, we focus here on comments that may enhance our ability to work without dogma. Since at least the 1980s, clinicians in intellectual disability have criticized the discipline for using linear and univariate rather than complex and multivariate theories, and for a naïve search for magic answers (reviewed in Clegg 1993). It is our contention that little has changed, and that uncertain meaning and normalization combine to create ideal conditions for dogma. Reinders' exposition of the various uses of meaning in our article and in different linguistic and historical traditions develops a vital but neglected topic in intellectual disability, which we consider in some detail. We conclude by arguing that developments require us to distance ourselves from the universality and commonality inherent to normalization, and create new ways to appreciate particularity and diversity.The gist of Reinders' complex argument appears to be that the problems we identify in managing bereavement in intellectual disability stem from a modernist understanding of meaning that is erroneous. Implicitly, those who eschew its pursuit demonstrate the greater wisdom, because neither dialogue nor activities such as reflection can generate meaning that is unattainable. If we understand his position correctly, he contrasts two principal understandings of meaning: comprehension and apprehension.Comprehension is the illusory modernist idea that humans are agents who make sense of themselves... (shrink)

Mourning exists at the nexus between individual experience, professional discourses, research, and culture, making it a complex issue for health services that has shown vibrant change in recent years. By contrast, bereavement discourse in intellectual disability is suffused by dogmatic assertions about correct intervention: we describe four vignettes to illustrate bereavement issues in intellectual disability. Suggestions concerning issues and management are made, but the article focuses primarily on the conceptual issues that underpin clinical intervention. The analysis shows how challenges to (...) the meaning of the disabled life, and to the understandings carers and staff draw on, tend to be resisted. We hypothesize this is most likely to surround issues that evoke cultural uncertainty, such as bereavement. The thesis is that the field of intellectual disability tends to be isolationist because meaning is difficult to create and easily dissolved, especially when addressing culturally contested topics. Dialogue with other disciplines is necessary to stop the field from atrophying, but needs to be carried out in ways that enable carers and clinicians to continue providing the support that people with intellectual disability require. (shrink)

Several recent results on the aggregation of judgments over logically connected propositions show that, under certain conditions, dictatorships are the only propositionwise aggregation functions generating fully rational (i.e., complete and consistent) collective judgments. A frequently mentioned route to avoid dictatorships is to allow incomplete collective judgments. We show that this route does not lead very far: we obtain oligarchies rather than dictatorships if instead of full rationality we merely require that collective judgments be deductively closed, arguably a minimal (...) condition of rationality, compatible even with empty judgment sets. We derive several characterizations of oligarchies and provide illustrative applications to Arrowian preference aggregation and Kasher and Rubinsteinís group identification problem. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is the view according to which the only basic requirement of morality is to maximize net aggregate welfare. This position has implications for the ethics of creating and rearing children. Most discussions of these implications focus either on the ethics of procreation and in particular on how many and whom it is right to create, or on whether utilitarianism permits the kind of partiality that child rearing requires. Despite its importance to creating and raising children, there are, by (...) contrast, few sustained discussions of the implications of utilitarian views of welfare for the matter of what makes a child’s life go well. This paper attempts to remedy this deficiency. It has four sections. Section one discusses the purpose of a theory of welfare and its adequacy conditions. Section two evaluates what prominent utilitarian theories of welfare imply about what makes a child’s life go well. Section three provides a sketch of a view about what is prudentially valuable for children. Section four sums things up. (shrink)

Abstract Normative criteria for evaluations of economic and social outcomes are often formulated in terms of social welfare functions which are essentially and importantly non-satiable. However, there are good reasons to consider certain normative criteria and many policy objectives to be capped, i.e. bounded, and thus satiable provided sufficient resources are made available for their satisfaction. Inspired by the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke class of indicators, this paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to develop a model for assessing outcomes in terms of capped (...) objectives based on an understanding of individual shortfalls from the objective, denoted needs. We present an indicator to measure need satisfaction in a population of individuals with heterogeneous needs and highlight an aggregation problem under scarcity. For such situations, we develop three ways in which the indicator can be weighted that reflect respectively concerns over the frequency, depth and severity of the need shortfalls and show that normative evaluations based on these weighting schemes can conflict, yielding mutually inconsistent outcome rankings. The indicator can be adapted to measure a wide variety of phenomena, e.g. health needs, education shortfalls, deprivation, etc., and it is suited for targeting exercises and other policy implementations. In particular, it allows for exogenous weighting schemes, i.e. weights that can incorporate non-shortfall characteristics relevant for the evaluation, e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, etc. The indicator thus enables new ways for researchers to promote and study satiable objectives in a wide variety of contexts relevant to economic and social policy, e.g. human development programs, poverty reduction, healthcare policies, etc. (shrink)

This paper examines the aggregation of preferences with a finitely additive measure space of agents. We consider three types of non-dictatorship axioms: non-dictatorship, coalitional non-dictatorship, and atomic non-dictatorship. First, we show that the existence of an atom is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a social welfare function that satisfies weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and coalitional non-dictatorship. Second, we simultaneously impose non-dictatorship and coalitional non-dictatorship, and specify a necessary and sufficient condition for the (...) finitely additive measure that guarantees the compatibility among the axioms. Third, we impose all non-dictatorship axioms and show that the corresponding measure is extremely restricted. (shrink)

A novel focus on "personal responsibility" has transformed political thought and public policy in America and Europe. Since the 1970s, responsibility--which once meant the moral duty to help and support others--has come to suggest an obligation to be self-sufficient. This narrow conception of responsibility has guided recent reforms of the welfare state, making key entitlements conditional on good behavior. Drawing on intellectual history, political theory, and moral philosophy, Yascha Mounk shows why the Age of Responsibility is pernicious--and how it (...) might be overcome. Mounk shows that today's focus on individual culpability is both wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe our fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to other key values, such as the desire to live in a society of equals. Recognizing that even society's neediest members seek to exercise genuine agency, Mounk builds a positive conception of responsibility. Instead of punishing individuals for their past choices, he argues, public policy should aim to empower them to take responsibility for themselves--and those around them. (shrink)

W.M. Gorman has been a major figure in the development of economies during the past forty years. His publications on separability, aggregation, duality and the modelling of consumer demand are recognized as fundamental contributions to economic theory. Many of his unpublished papers have achieved similar status as privately-circulated classics.This volume brings together for the first time all Gorman's important work, much of which has never been published before, on aggregation across commodities and agents, including separability, budgeting, representative agents, (...) and the construction of capital and labour aggregates. Each chapter is preceded by an editorial introduction which describes its origin and place within the literature as well as the main results themselves. A forthcoming second volume, Modelling and Methodology, will cover topics on duality, demand, trade, and welfare.This book will appeal to academic economists interested in either specific aspects of Gorman's work or in the evolution of economic theory. (shrink)

Desire', 'preference', 'utility', '(utility-aggregating) moral desirability' are terms that build on each other in this order. The article follows this definitional structure and presents these terms and their justifications. The aim is to present welfare-ethical criteria of the common good that define 'moral desirability' as an aggregation, e.g. addition, of individual utility: utilitarianism, utility egalitarianism, leximin, prioritarianism.

This article argues that annual hours per employed person and per working-age person capture important dimensions of political-economic success that should be weighed against aggregate employment and wealth patterns. It also argues that partisan-driven work-time policies and welfare-regime institutions give rise to diverging Social Democratic, Liberal, and Christian Democratic “worlds” of work time in terms of these two measures. Descriptive statistics for eighteen Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries reveal broad clustering and trends suggestive of the Three Worlds, (...) while panel estimation suggests the influence of partisan and welfare-institutional conditions underlying them. Case study of Finland, the United States, and the Netherlands further illustrates the political process and sequence of the Three Worlds. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this (...) idea suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it. (shrink)

Outcome-adaptive randomization has been proposed as a corrective to certain ethical difficulties inherent in the traditional randomized clinical trial using fixed-ratio randomization. In particular, it has been suggested that OAR redresses the balance between individual and collective ethics in favour of the former. In this paper, I examine issues of welfare and autonomy arising in relation to OAR. A central issue in discussions of welfare in OAR is equipoise, and the moral status of OAR is crucially influenced by (...) the way in which this concept is construed. If OAR is based on a model of equipoise that demands strict indifference between competing interventions throughout the trial, such equipoise is disturbed by accruing data favouring one treatment over another; OAR seeks to redress this by weighting randomization to the seemingly superior treatment. However, this is a partial response, as patients continue to be allocated to the inferior therapy. Moreover, it rests upon considerations of aggregate harms and benefits, and does not therefore uphold individual ethics. Issues of fairness also arise, as early and late enrollees are randomized on a different basis. Fixed-ratio randomization represents a fuller and more consistent response to a loss of equipoise, as so construed. With regard to consent, the complexity of OAR poses challenges to adequate disclosure and comprehension. Additionally, OAR does not offer a remedy to the therapeutic misconception—participants’ tendency to attribute treatment allocation in an RCT to individual clinical judgments, rather than to scientific considerations—and, if anything, accentuates rather than alleviates this misconception. In relation to these issues, OAR fails to offer ethical advantages over fixed-ratio randomization. More broadly, the ethical basis of OAR can be seen to lie more in collective than in individual ethics, and overall it fares worse in this territory than fixed-ratio randomization. (shrink)

Suppose, as biocentrists do, that even microorganisms have a good of their own - that is, some objective form of welfare. Still, human welfare is vastly greater and more valuable. If it were infinitely greater, individualistic biocentrism would be pointless. But consideration of the facts of evolutionary history and of the conceptual relations between infinity and incommensurability reveals that there are no infinite welfare differences among living things. It follows, in particular, that there is some very large (...) number of bacteria whose aggregate overall welfare is not less than the welfare of a human being. (shrink)

In the theory of judgment aggregation, it is known for which agendas of propositions it is possible to aggregate individual judgments into collective ones in accordance with the Arrow-inspired requirements of universal domain, collective rationality, unanimity preservation, non-dictatorship and propositionwise independence. But it is only partially known (e.g., only in the monotonic case) for which agendas it is possible to respect additional requirements, notably non-oligarchy, anonymity, no individual veto power, or implication preservation. We fully characterize the agendas for which (...) there are such possibilities, thereby answering the most salient open questions about propositionwise judgment aggregation. Our results build on earlier results by Nehring and Puppe (2002), Nehring (2006), Dietrich and List (2007a) and Dokow and Holzman (2010a). (shrink)

Utilitarianism and other aggregationist moral theories view the public interest or the general welfare as an aggregate of individual goods. But critics of these theories question whether there is adequate justification for employing the concept of an aggregate social good. How are we supposed to sum up individual interests? Is it even possible to compare the utilities of different people or to assign values to individual utilities that can be added or subtracted? If not, how is the general good (...) to be aggregated? Critics have also raised concerns about the aggregative approach in ethics - concerns about its implications for distributive justice, individual liberty and democratic institutions. The essays in this volume explore these issues and address related questions. Some of them examine specific objections to aggregation, others analyze the very idea of a social good or social welfare. Other essays discuss the application of aggregative principles to particular problems. (shrink)

There can be no relevant cardinal assessment of the welfares of individuals that would allow traditional comparisons of average and total welfare of whole societies to be made. Given that cardinally additive welfare measures are unavailable, I work out some of the implications of an ordinal utilitarian analysis of international distributional issues. I first address the general problem of utilitarian comparisons between aggregates, then the nature of ordinal transfers between groups or nations, and then the complications that population (...) growth in impoverished nations entails for such comparisons. I conclude with remarks on the difficulties and the benefits of thinking ordinally in general. (shrink)

In response to recent work on the aggregation of individual judgments on logically connected propositions into collective judgments, it is often asked whether judgment aggregation is a special case of Arrowian preference aggregation. We argue for the converse claim. After proving two impossibility theorems on judgment aggregation (using "systematicity" and "independence" conditions, respectively), we construct an embedding of preference aggregation into judgment aggregation and prove Arrow’s theorem (stated for strict preferences) as a corollary of (...) our second result. Although we thereby provide a new proof of Arrow’s theorem, our main aim is to identify the analogue of Arrow’s theorem in judgment aggregation, to clarify the relation between judgment and preference aggregation, and to illustrate the generality of the judgment aggregation model. JEL Classi…cation: D70, D71.. (shrink)

Judgment-aggregation theory has always focused on the attainment of rational collective judgments. But so far, rationality has been understood in static terms: as coherence of judgments at a given time, defined as consistency, completeness, and/or deductive closure. This paper asks whether collective judgments can be dynamically rational, so that they change rationally in response to new information. Formally, a judgment aggregation rule is dynamically rational with respect to a given revision operator if, whenever all individuals revise their judgments (...) in light of some information (a learnt proposition), then the new aggregate judgments are the old ones revised in light of this information, i.e., aggregation and revision commute. We prove an impossibility theorem: if the propositions on the agenda are non-trivially connected, no judgment aggregation rule with standard properties is dynamically rational with respect to any revision operator satisfying some basic conditions on revision. Our theorem is the dynamic-rationality counterpart of some well-known impossibility theorems for static rationality. We also explore how dynamic rationality might be achieved by relaxing some of the conditions on the aggregation rule and/or the revision operator. Notably, premise-based aggregation rules are dynamically rational with respect to so-called premise-based revision operators. (shrink)

In this book some options concerning the greenhouse effect are assessed from a welfarist point of view: business as usual, stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions and reduction by 25% and by 60%. Up to today only economic analyses of such options are available, which monetize welfare losses. Because this is found to be wanting from a moral point of view, the present study welfarizes (among others) monetary losses on the basis of a hedonistic utilitarianism and other, justice incorporating, (...) class='Hi'>welfare ethics. For these welfarist evaluations information about the social consequences of the four options are collected from the literature and eventually corrected; then the consequences for individual well-being are assessed based on psychological research about well-being dependent on the social situation of the individual; finally the aggregation formulas of the respective welfare ethics are applied to these data. Assessments by other types of ethics, e.g. Kantian ethic, are included. The strongest abatement option is found to be optimum with great unanimity. - In addition a cost-welfare analysis of greenhouse gas abatement is undertaken revealing efficient cost-welfare ratios for these measures and the most efficient ratio for the strongest option. - A final, more theoretical part discusses the moral obligations following from such evaluations. The notion of 'moral obligation' is explained in a way that, apart from moral goodness of the required act, reinforcement by formal or informal sanctions is another necessary condition for moral obligations. This leads to a conception of a historical morality according to which the demands of morality rise in the long run. Applying this conception to the greenhouse effect implies that presently we have the moral duty to raise the standards of greenhouse gas abatement as much as is politically feasible. (shrink)

Suppose that A and B are two kinds of goods such that more of each is better than less. A is strongly superior to B if any amount of A is better than any amount of B. It is weakly superior to B if some amount of A is better than any amount of B. There are many examples of these relations in the literature, sometimes under the labels “higher goods” and “discontinuity.” The chapter gives a precise and generalized statement (...) of Strong and Weak Superiority and discusses different ways in which these relations can be relevant to the aggregation of welfare. It also proves a number of general results. One of the results gives rise to a dilemma: It can be used as an argument against the existence of value superiority or, alternatively, as an argument against the view that superiority entails a radical difference in value. (shrink)

In the emerging literature on judgment aggregation over logically connected proposi- tions, expert rights or liberal rights have not been investigated yet. A group making collective judgments may assign individual members or subgroups with expert know- ledge on, or particularly affected by, certain propositions the right to determine the collective judgment on those propositions. We identify a problem that generalizes Sen's 'liberal paradox'. Under plausible conditions, the assignment of rights to two or more individuals or subgroups is inconsistent with (...) the unanimity principle, whereby unanimously accepted propositions are collectively accepted. The inconsistency can be avoided if individual judgments or rights satisfy special conditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Normalization and the Welfare StateLadelle McWhorterIn Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, I argued that as race was absorbed into biology in the nineteenth century, it was recast from a morphological typology to a function of physiological and evolutionary development (McWhorter 2009b). Racial difference became a sign of developmental difference. Racial groups represented stages of human evolution, and raced individuals were to be disciplined and managed in accordance (...) with developmental norms.Twentieth-century race was therefore a category and tool of normalization; to be raced was to be located at a particular point along a developmental curve. Some races were thought to be more or less arrested in their development, while others were merely retarded, and theorists disagreed at times about which were which. But they all agreed that the most highly developed race was the Nordic or the Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxons were the norm for modern human beings— anatomically, physiologically, intellectually, and morally. There were other white races whose status was debated (Mediterraneans and Ashkenazi Jews, for example), and there were disputes over the evolutionary status of Chinese, Hindus, and Mexicans. But most theorists agreed that at the very bottom of the developmental scale we should place Celts, Negroes, and American Indians. These peoples were savages, primitives. They should be trained to the extent possible to contribute to the society that had already superseded them, but their proper destiny was to pass away into extinction as humanity advanced.These evolutionary stragglers, along with the evolutionary throwbacks that appeared sometimes among whites, were considered dangerous for two main reasons. First, a great many of them were expensive. They were shiftless, often incompetent, and frequently lawless. Because of them, it was necessary to [End Page 39] maintain police forces, prisons, poorhouses, and asylums. They were a drain on the economic advance of society, which affected its educational and technological advance and ultimately its evolutionary advance as well. Second, because they had primitive sexual urges unrestrained by reason as well as heritable defects and diseases, they threatened the bloodlines of more advanced human beings. In short, they posed a risk for the ongoing evolutionary advancement of the entire Human Race. To protect the Race, it was necessary to contain these primitives, savages, and throwbacks and to reduce their numbers through careful management of their sexuality. This, I argued in the book, was racism’s cutting edge in the early twentieth century.Since publishing the book, I have done some work on the changes in practices of racism in the wake of the Biological Synthesis—that is, the unification of biology and genetics that occurred in the 1930s through the efforts of renowned scientists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr (McWhorter 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). As I discussed in that work, by 1950, evolutionary biology was less a study of species development than it was a study of the effects of evolutionary forces acting on and within populations. Correlatively, racial practices shifted toward management of statistically delineated populations or ethnic groups. Theorists and policymakers recognized that not all members of a given population have the same genes, meaning that old-style racism (which assumed, for example, that all Negroes were stupid) was false; some Negroes might be quite brilliant, in fact. It was not The Negro who was stupid but the population of Negroes in the aggregate that was measurably stupider than the population of Anglo-Saxons. Accordingly, normalization now occurred at the level of the population. Disciplinary practices designed for cultivating the capacities of groups of individuals were altered or replaced to focus on groups as groups, as aggregates. The point was to shift the statistical norm of the population rather than to alter the bodies or behavior of each and every individual. I have argued elsewhere (McWhorter 2009a, 5) that this merger of disciplinary normalization and population management constitutes the full flowering of what Foucault calls biopower (Foucault 1978, 140).When Lisa Guenther invited me to speak at the plenary on “Re-thinking Whiteness” that took place at the fifth annual meeting of philoSOPHIA at Vanderbilt University, she explained that although many presenters offer polished papers, it has been a... (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the stability of the aggregation procedure of individual preferences. In particular, we propose the stability under the addition of social preference, which is a normative property of democratic collective decision making. We establish impossibility and possibility theorems for non-dictatorial aggregation procedures.

This paper argues that we should replace the common classification of theories of welfare into the categories of hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. The tripartite classification is objectionable because it is unduly narrow and it is confusing: it excludes theories of welfare that are worthy of discussion, and it obscures important distinctions. In its place, the paper proposes two independent classifications corresponding to a distinction emphasised by Roger Crisp: a four-category classification of enumerative theories (about which (...) items constitute welfare), and a four-category classification of explanatory theories (about why these items constitute welfare). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Convention on Human Rights and BiomedicineCouncil of EuropePreambleThe Member States of the Council of Europe, the other States and the European Community signatories hereto,Bearing in mind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948;Bearing in mind the (...) Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950;Bearing in mind the European Social Charter of 18 October 1961;Bearing in mind the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data of 28 January 1981;Bearing also in mind the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989;Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of a greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;Conscious of the accelerating developments in biology and medicine;Convinced of the need to respect the human being both as an individual and as a member of the human species and recognising the importance of ensuring the dignity of the human being; [End Page 277]Conscious that the misuse of biology and medicine may lead to acts endangering human dignity;Affirming that progress in biology and medicine should be used for the benefit of present and future generations;Stressing the need for international co-operation so that all humanity may enjoy the benefits of biology and medicine;Recognising the importance of promoting a public debate on the questions posed by the application of biology and medicine and the responses to be given thereto;Wishing to remind all members of society of their rights and responsibilities;Taking account of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly in this field, including Recommendation 1160 (1991) on the preparation of a Convention on bioethics;Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine;Have agreed as follows:Chapter IGeneral provisionsArticle 1. (Purpose and object)Parties to this Convention shall protect the dignity and identity of all human beings and guarantee everyone, without discrimination, respect for their integrity and other rights and fundamental freedoms with regard to the application of biology and medicine.Each Party shall take in its internal law the necessary measures to give effect to the provisions of this Convention.Article 2. (Primacy of the human being)The interests and welfare of the human being shall prevail over the sole interest of society or science.Article 3. (Equitable access to health care)Parties, taking into account health needs and available resources, shall take appropriate measures with a view to providing, within their jurisdiction, equitable access to health care of appropriate quality. [End Page 278]Article 4. (Professional standards)Any intervention in the health field, including research, must be carried out in accordance with relevant professional obligations and standards.Chapter IIConsentArticle 5. (General rule)An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it.This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks.The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.Article 6. (Protection of persons not able to consent)1. Subject to Articles 17 and 20 below, an intervention may only be carried out on a person who does not have the capacity to consent, for his or her direct benefit.2. Where, according to law, a minor does not have the capacity to consent to an intervention, the intervention may only be carried out with the authorisation of his or her representative or an authority or a person or... (shrink)

Applying competing ethical theories to the issue of bovine TB and badger culling can throw light on the validity of the policy options. Utilitarianism is, superficially at least, an attractive option. However, the aggregative principle is problematic and this is well illustrated in the case of bovine TB and badger culling. Such is the variety and strength of interests to be considered that it is not at all clear which course of action will maximise utility. In addition, it may be (...) that the full range of consequences can never be known with any degree of accuracy. An alternative option is to revert to an animal welfare ethic. This has the effect of cutting down the moral complexities involved in a discussion of bovine TB and badger culling, since, providing it is done humanely, killing badgers is not an ethical issue, and even the infliction of suffering on them is permissible providing it serves a significant human benefit. The animal welfare ethic, however, is normatively inadequate because it exaggerates the ethical importance of personhood. Because of this, it allows us to justify killing badgers, and might even justify the infliction of considerable suffering if by so doing there is a good chance that economic benefits will accrue. As a result, a deontological position, where animals are accorded the protection of rights, seems a much more promising alternative to utilitarianism. The adoption of any variety of animal rights would render badger culling morally illegitimate. (shrink)

Does globalization undermine the fiscal basis of the welfare state? Some observers are not convinced. They claim that aggregate data on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries show no drop in tax levels and conclude from this that tax competition is not a serious challenge for the welfare state. This conclusion is unwarranted. The article shows that tax competition systematically constrains national tax autonomy in a serious way. It prevents governments from raising taxes in response to rising (...) spending requirements and from detaxing labor in response to growing unemployment. (shrink)

A conceptual and mathematical model of a social community behavior in a choice situation under a veil of ignorance, where two alternative policies—Rawlsian maximin and Harsanyian utilitarianism—can be implemented through the aggregation of individual preferences over these two policies, is constructed and investigated. We first incorporate in our conceptual model psychological features such as risk-aversion and prosocial preferences that likely underlie choices of welfare policies. We secondly develop and select the mathematical model presented it by means of an (...) autonomous system of ordinary differential equations. A qualitative analysis of this system global phase-plane behavior shows possible tendencies of community development under social choices over Rawlsian or utilitarian societies depending on psychological parameters such as risk aversion and prosocial preferences. (shrink)

Burkart et al. present a paradox – general factors of intelligence exist among individual differences (g) in performance in several species, and also at the aggregate level (G); however, there is ambiguous evidence for the existence of g when analyzing data using a mixed approach, that is, when comparing individuals of different species using the same cognitive ability battery. Here, we present an empirical solution to this paradox.

How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove (...) two new theorems. Our first theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the specific kinds of attitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggregation rules applicable to a variety of belief-like attitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation. (shrink)

The dominant approach to environmental policy endorsed by conservative and libertarian policy thinkers, so-called “free market environmentalism”, is grounded in the recognition and protection of property rights in environmental resources. Despite this normative commitment to property rights, most self-described FME advocates adopt a utilitarian, welfare-maximization approach to climate change policy, arguing that the costs of mitigation measures could outweigh the costs of climate change itself. Yet even if anthropogenic climate change is decidedly less than catastrophic, human-induced climate change is (...) likely to contribute to environmental changes that violate traditional conceptions of property rights. Viewed globally, the actions of some countries—primarily industrialized nations—are likely to increase environmental harms suffered by other countries—less developed nations that have not made any significant contribution to climate change. It may well be that aggregate human welfare would be maximized in a warmer, wealthier world, or that the gains from climate change will offset environmental losses. Yet such claims, even if demonstrated, would not address the normative concern that the consequences of anthropogenic global warming would infringe upon the rights of people in less-developed nations. As a consequence, this paper calls for a rethinking of FME approaches to climate change policy. (shrink)

This paper proves two theorems for homogeneous juries that arise from different solutions to the problem of aggregation of dichotomous choice. In the first theorem, negative correlation increases the competence of the jury, while positive correlation has the opposite effect. An enlargement of the jury with positive correlation can be detrimental up to a certain size, beyond which it becomes beneficial. The second theorem finds a family of distributions for which correlation has no effect on a jury’s competence. The (...) approach allows us to compute the bounds on a jury’s competence as the maximum and minimum probability of it being correct for a given individual competence and dependence structure. (shrink)

Utilitarianism, it has been said, is not sensitive to the distribution of welfare. In making risky decisions for others there are multiple sensitivities at work. I present examples of risky decision-making involving drug allocations, charitable giving, breast-cancer screening and C-sections. In each of these examples there is a different sensitivity at work that pulls away from the utilitarian prescription. Instances of saving fewer people at a greater risk to many is more complex because there are two distributional sensitivities at (...) work that pull in opposite directions from the utilitarian calculus. I discuss objections to these sensitivities and conclude with some reflections on the value of formal modelling in thinking about societal risk. (shrink)

Many theorists claim that justice is a question-begging concept that has no inherent substantive content. They point to disagreements among justice theorists themselves about basic aspects of the justice theory, such as the nature of corrective justice and the distinction between it and distributive justice, as even further reason to dismiss the concept of justice or to fill it with their preferred theoretical content. Yet most persons perceive that the concept of justice is not an empty shell. Since ancient times (...) it has been thought to encompass not merely a formal equality (treating like cases alike), but also a substantive equality grounded in the equal dignity of each human being which requires giving each person his or her "due" - what is his or hers as a matter of right - a requirement that is usually understood to be in direct conflict with the basic principles of aggregate social welfare theories such as utilitarianism or its modern variant, economic efficiency. The elaboration of this substantive equality and its implications for morality, justice, and law form the core of the natural-law or natural-right theories of law. In this article I build upon a summary and critique of John Finnis's natural law theory (1) to delineate the basic assumptions and principles of the natural law theory regarding the foundations of and relationships among morality, justice, and law; (2) to demonstrate the agreement of major natural law theorists, from Aristotle through Aquinas and Kant to Finnis, on these basic assumptions and principles; (3) to distinguish these basic assumptions and principles from those of the competing theories of utilitarianism and economic efficiency; and (4) to clarify the nature of and distinctions between the two basic divisions of substantive justice: distributive justice and interactive justice. I use the term "interactive justice" instead of the usual term, "corrective justice," since the former term is much more informative and precise in conveying the distinct nature and domain of this type of justice, whereas the latter term almost always misleads people into one or both of two related misconceptions: (1) that "corrective" justice is concerned solely with the correction of wrongful injuries and has nothing to say about the nature of the underlying wrongs or the prevention of their occurrence, and (2) that it is merely a remedial corollary of distributive justice which corrects deviations from the distributively just distribution. Distributive justice and interactive justice separately address the two fundamental problems of human existence, and they employ quite different criteria of equality to resolve those problems. Together, they seek to assure the attainment of the common good (the full realization, to the extent practicable, of each person's humanity) by providing each person with her fair share of the social stock of instrumental goods (positive freedom via distributive justice) and by securing her person and her existing stock of instrumental goods from interactions with others that are inconsistent with her status as a rational being with equal, absolute moral worth (negative freedom via interactive justice). (shrink)

My focus is on aggregation of individual value rankings of alternatives to a collective value ranking. This is compared with aggregation o individual prefrences to a collective preference. While in an individual preference ranking the alternatives are ordered in accordance with one’s preferences, the order in a value ranking expresses one’s comparative evaluation of the alternatives, from the best to the worst. I suggest that, despite their formal similarity as rankings, this difference in the nature of individual inputs (...) in two aggregation scenarios has important implications: The kind of procedure that looks fine for aggregation of judgments is inappropriate for aggregation of preferences. The procedure I have in mind consists in similarity maximization, or – more precisely – in minimization of the average distance from individual inputs. When applied to judgment aggregation, this procedure can also be approached from the epistemic perspective: the questions are posed concerning its advantages as a truth-tracker. From that perspective, what matters is not only the probability of the outcome of the procedure being true, but also the expected verisimilitude of the outcome: its expected distance from truth. (shrink)