An ordinal modification of classical utilitarianism

Abstract

Classical utilitarianism holds that moral assessment ought to be rooted in a determination of the value of states of the world, and that the value of such a state is the sum of excess pleasure over pain that it contains.1 The view has, in pleasure and pain, a clear and intuitive account of what might ground the truth of ethical propositions, but it is subject to a number of persuasive objections. Two of these are related: Classical utilitarianism is notoriously insensitive to the distribu? tion of pleasure and pain, and hence seems to offend our moral intuition that distribution matters. This insensitivity is underwritten by a second counterintuitive feature of the view its arithmetization of pleasure and pain. If value can be added and subtracted, then the value of a whole is not a function of distribution, just as the weight of a whole is not. But many suspect that it does not make sense to speak of an exact sum of pleasures and pains, in the way that classical utilitarianism requires and that supports distribution insensitivity. This paper proposes a modi? fication of classical utilitarianism which fares better in these two ways, which does not require an arithmetization of pleasure and pain and which is sensitive to distribution.