Two kinds of priority (original) (raw)
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Prioritarianism: Response to Critics
Prioritarianism is a distinctive moral view. Outcomes are ranked according to the sum of concavely transformed well-being numbers—by contrast with utilitarianism, which simply adds up well-being. Thus, unlike utilitarians, prioritarians give extra moral weight to the well-being of the worse off. Unlike egalitarians, prioritarians endorse an axiom of person-separability: the ranking of outcomes is independent of the well-being levels of unaffected individuals. Unlike sufficientists, who give no priority to the worse-off if their well-being exceeds a “sufficiency” threshold, prioritarians always favor the worse-off in conflicts with those at higher well-being levels. Derek Parfit is prioritarianism’s most famous proponent. We have also defended prioritarianism. Not everyone is persuaded. Prioritarianism has been vigorously criticized, from a variety of perspectives, most visibly by John Broome, Campbell Brown, Lara Buchak, Roger Crisp, Hilary Greaves, David McCarthy, Michael Otsuka, Ingmar Persson, Shlomi Segall, Larry Temkin, and Alex Voorhoeve. In this Article, we answer the critics.
Utilitarianism and prioritarianism II
Economics and Philosophy 24(1) (2008): 1–33, 2008
A natural formalization of the priority view is presented which results from adding expected utility theory to the main ideas of the priority view. The result is ex post prioritarianism. But ex post prioritarianism entails that in a world containing just one person, it is sometimes better for that person to do what is strictly worse for herself. This claim may appear to be implausible. But the deepest objection to ex post prioritarianism has to do with meaning: ex post prioritarianism is not a genuine alternative to utilitarianism in the first place. By contrast, ex ante prioritarianism is defensible. But its motivation is very different from the usual rationales offered for the priority view. Given their hostility to egalitarianism, most supporters of the priority view have not provided reasons to reject utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism and prioritarianism I
Economics and Philosophy 22(3) (2006): 335–63, 2006
Utilitarianism and prioritarianism make a strong assumption about the uniqueness of measures of how good things are for people, or for short, individual goodness measures. But it is far from obvious that the presupposition is correct. The usual response to this problem assumes that individual goodness measures are determined independently of our discourse about distributive theories. This article suggests reversing this response. What determines the set of individual goodness measures just is the body of platitudes we accept about distributive theories. When prioritarianism is taken to have an ex ante form, this approach vindicates the utilitarian and prioritarian presupposition, and provides an answer to an argument due to Broome that for different reasons to do with measurement, prioritarianism is meaningless.
Prioritarian Welfare Functions-An Elaboration and Justification
2005
Apart from Rawls' maximin criterion, there are two main lines of correcting utilitarianism for considerations of distributional justice: egalitarianism (seeking to equalize utilities) and prioritarianism (giving more weight to improving the lot of those worse off). Though many people find prioritarianism appealing until now it has not been elaborated that much. The paper tries to help to fill several gaps left open. 1. A definition and mathematical distinction of egalitarian and prioritarian welfare functions will be given. 2. In an intuitive discussion of several candidates for prioritarian welfare functions one class of functions that are particularly apt to model prioritarian intuitions is filtered out, namely exponential functions. And some empirical findings are brought in for calibrating the functions' parameter for the degree of priority. 3. An internalistic justification of prioritarianism on the basis of sympathy is developed. Assuming an empirically founded (non-li...
"Priority, Preference and Value", Utilitas (2012)
Utilitas, 2012
This article seeks to defend prioritarianism against a pair of challenges from Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve. Otsuka and Voorhoeve first argue that prioritarianism makes implausible recommendations in one-person cases under conditions of risk, as it fails to allow that it is reasonable to act to maximize expected utility, rather than expected weighted benefits, in such cases. I show that, in response, prioritarians can either reject Otsuka and Voorhoeve's claim, by means of appealing to a distinction between personal and impersonal value, or alternatively they can harmlessly accommodate it, by means of appealing to the status of prioritarianism as a view about the moral value of outcomes, rather than as an account of all-things-considered reasonable action. Otsuka and Voorhoeve secondly claim that prioritarianism fails to explain a divergence in our considered moral judgement between one-person and many-person cases. I show that the prioritarian has two alternative, and independently plausible, lines of response to this charge, one more concessive and the other more unyielding. Hence, neither of Otsuka and Voorhoeve's challenges need seriously trouble the prioritarian.
Priority, Preference and Value
Utilitas, 2012
This article seeks to defend prioritarianism against a pair of challenges from Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve. Otsuka and Voorhoeve first argue that prioritarianism makes implausible recommendations in one-person cases under conditions of risk, as it fails to allow that it is reasonable to act to maximize expected utility, rather than expected weighted benefits, in such cases. I show that, in response, prioritarians can either reject Otsuka and Voorhoeve's claim, by means of appealing to a distinction between personal and impersonal value, or alternatively they can harmlessly accommodate it, by means of appealing to the status of prioritarianism as a view about the moral value of outcomes, rather than as an account of all-things-considered reasonable action. Otsuka and Voorhoeve secondly claim that prioritarianism fails to explain a divergence in our considered moral judgement between one-person and many-person cases. I show that the prioritarian has two alternative, and inde...
Utility, Priorities, and Quiescent Sufficiency
Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 2019
In this article, I firstly discuss why a prioritarian clause can rescue the utilitarian doctrine from the risk of exacerbating inequality in the distribution of resources in those cases in which utility of income does not decline at the margin. Nonetheless, when in the presence of adaptive preferences, classic prioritarianism is more likely than utilitarianism to increase the inequality of re- sources under all circumstances, independently of the diminishing trend of utility. Hence, I propose to shift the informational focus of prioritarianism from welfare to either social income or capabilities in order to safeguard those who are worse off . Following this, I argue that we may have reasons to limit the aggregative logic of priority amended utilitarianism through one or more sufficiency thresholds, an d that we can partially defuse the negative thesis objection that is usually levelled against sufficientarianism, provided we interpret the threshold(s) as valid only as long as everyone is led above it.
Utilitas, 2015
"Prioritarianism is supposed to be a theory of the overall good that captures the common intuition of "priority to the worse off ". But it is difficult to give precise content to the prioritarian claim. Over the past few decades, prioritarians have increasingly responded to this `content problem' by formulating prioritarianism not in terms of an alleged primitive notion of quantity of well-being, but instead in terms of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility. The resulting two forms of prioritarianism (which I call, respectively, "Primitivist" and "Technical" prioritarianism) are not mere variants on a theme, but are entirely distinct theories, amenable to different motivating arguments and open to different objections. This paper argues that the basic intuition of "priority to the worse o ff" provides no support for Technical Prioritarianism: qua attempt to capture that intuition, the turn to von Neumann-Morgenstern utility is a retrograde step.
An Axiomatic Analysis of Priority
In this paper, we reexamine the axiomatic foundation of prioritarianism – a distributive ethical view originating from Derek Parfit (1991) that claims that “[b]enefiting people matters more the worse off these people are” (Parfit 1991: 19). In previous work, prioritarianism has been characterized by the following five axioms: Pigou-Dalton, Separability, Anonymity, Pareto, and Continuity. Among these axioms, many scholars have regarded Pigou-Dalton (along with Separability) as the key defining feature that distinguishes prioritarianism from other continuous welfarist views. We disagree: not because we think the Pigou-Dalton principle is incompatible with prioritarianism (it is), but because the Pigou-Dalton principle fails to distinguish prioritarianism from telic egalitarianism, which is what motivated Parfit to present prioritarianism as an alternative view of distributive ethics in the first place. Instead, we propose a new axiom, which we call “Priority,” which clearly expresses Parfit’s original prioritarian idea, as the main defining property of prioritarianism, and offer a new axiomatic characterization of prioritarianism in terms of this new axiom. We then analyze the precise logical relationships between Priority and the other axioms. Finally, we explore the important issue of measurability and interpersonal comparison of well-being in relation to prioritarianism. There have criticisms that the prioritarian social welfare function may not satisfy some information invariance property with respect to measurability and interpersonal comparability of well-being. It turns out that, compared to other social welfare orderings (such as utilitarianism, maximin, leximin, the general Gini ordering, etc.), prioritarianism may require a stronger well-being measure (viz., a translation-scale or a ratio-scale) than a cardinal measure with full interpersonal comparability to retain its normative and theoretical significance. From such observations, we specify the class of prioritarian social welfare functions free from this criticism.