Rationality As Maximizing Utility

Abstract

Abstract It will be argued in this chapter and the next that the axiomatic utility theory developed by neo-Walrasian economists and by decision theorists, for all its formal austerity, presents a view of rational choice or action which favours teleological (or consequentialist) moral philosophy in general and utilitarianism in particular. Now, of course, most people would agree with John Broome (1991a) that part of ethics is concerned with good. A teleological ethical theory, however, claims (roughly) that the whole of moral philosophy is about maximizing good. Utilitarian ism, in its various versions, belongs among teleological theories. Such theories have been shown to lend themselves to formalization in terms of the structure of utility theory, specifically of axiomatic expected utility theory. The structure of concepts like ‘good’ and ‘well-being’ (more precisely the structure of the ‘betterness’ rela tion) and the formal structure of axiomatic utility theory, have been shown to have important features in common. As we shall see, the economic theorists and decision theorists who developed expected utility theory in the 1950s and 1960s embraced axiomatizations which happen to favour a particular moral philosophy (utilitarianism), all the while believing that they were producing value-free’ science.