Average Utilitarianism Research Articles

Normative population theory

We have shown, contrary to the claims of Cowen, that average and critical-level utilitarianism, which do not suffer from the repugnant conclusion, do not recommend the killing of people with low but positive utilities. We have shown, in addition, that Methuselah's paradox and the repugnant conclusion do not stem from preferences that are represented by additive utility functions. Further, we have shown that Cowen's ideal participant method suffers from the repugnant conclusion. We believe that Parfit's [4] criticism of classical utilitarianism — that it satisfies the repugnant conclusion — should be taken seriously. That suggests that the ideal participant method should be rejected (along with classical utilitarianism) as a reasonable solution to the optimal population problem.

The diminishing marginal value of happy people

Thomas Hurka has recently proposed a utilitarian theory which would effect a compromise between Average and Total utilitarianism, the better to deal with issues in population ethics. This Compromise theory would incorporate the principle that the value which an extra happy person contributes to a possible world is a decreasing function of the total population of that world: that happy people are of diminishing marginal value. In spite of its initial plausibility I argue against this principle. I show that the Compromise theory is actually no improvement over the two original versions of utilitarianism; in particular, it is subject to almost all the objections which are fatal to Average utilitarianism, and more besides. And I attempt to dispell the appearance that intuition supports the Compromise theory as against Total utilitarianism, by arguing that the latter's “Repugnant Conclusion,” when properly understood, is not intuitively unacceptable. Total utilitarianism remains a plausible ethical theory, while both the Average and the Compromise theories should be definitely rejected.

Utilitarianism and the wrongness of killing

Richard Henson has argued that hedonistic-average-act-utilitarianism has the extremely counter-intuitive consequence that certain individuals ought to be killed simply because they are unhappy and because their deaths would raise the average level of happiness. It is argued that Henson's criticisms are correct and that they can be extended to other versions of utilitarianism: total (as opposed to average) utilitarianism, non-hedonistic versions of utilitarianism, and those versions of act-utilitarianism that have originated in the recent controversy about population control.