Talk:Utilitarianism

referencing Jeremy Bentham's INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION, Jeremy Bentham, 1789.

from Preface:

"Note.—The First Edition of this work was printed in the year 1780; and first published in 1789. The present Edition is a careful reprint of 'A New Edition, corrected by the Author,' which was published in 1823."

---

also

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Introduction_to_the_Principles_of_Morals_and_Legislation

Peter Singer on giving benefit of the doubt to shrimp and oysters.

“ . . . and in the first edition of this book I suggested that somewhere between shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any. Accordingly, I continued occasionally to eat oysters, scallops, and mussels for some time after I became in every other respect, a vegetarian. But while one cannot with any confidence say that these creatures do feel pain, so one can equally have little confidence in saying that they do not feel pain. Moreover, if they do feel pain, a meal of oysters or mussels would inflict pain on a considerable number of creatures. Since it is so easy to avoid eating them, I now think it better to do so.” -Peter Singer, Animal Liberation. 1990, (171-174) http://www.wesleyan.edu/wsa/warn/singer_fish.htm

'Lack of convincing proof'

This subsection, located under the ‘Criticisms’ heading, doesn’t describe the actual criticism. This suggests violation of NPOV. Furthermost (talk) 03:42, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Conflict with Prioritarianism

Prioritarianism contains:

Indeed, like utilitarianism, prioritarianism is a form of aggregative consequentialism; however, it differs from utilitarianism in that it does not rank outcomes solely on the basis of overall well-being.

However, this article presents "Negative utilitarianism" as a form of utilitarianism, even though negative utilitarianism doesn't only consider overall well-being.--Chealer (talk) 19:31, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

"Negative utilitarianism" is an umbrella term for ethics that models the asymmetry of happiness and suffering, see Fabian Fricke (2002), Verschiedene Versionen des negativen Utilitarismus, Kriterion, vol.15, no.1. Consequently, the conflict is not between negative utilitarianism and prioritarianism. The versions of negative utilitarianism can be interpreted as special weighing functions (border cases) within prioritarianism. The problem is that historically the term "negative utilitarianism" preceeded the term "prioritarianism" and included the main idea of prioritarianism. Obviously, at that time, it was accepted that the term "utilitarianism" could be used for ethics that weighes the well-being of each individual (with the special case weight = zero) before accumulating it into the total. Popper's "The Open society and its Ennemies" appeared in 1945 whereas the term "prioritarianism" dates back to Temkin’s 1983 Ph.D. thesis (see Larry Temkin, Wikipedia). Why not define prioritarianism as a form of utilitarianism (as in 1945)? There are contemporary ethicians who maintain that the weighing function should be replaced by a metric within utilitarianism, see Broome John (1991), Weighing Goods, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, page 222. If we follow this idea then there is no difference between prioritarianism and utilitarianism at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.164.104.206 (talk) 06:12, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I propose you change the beginning of the Wikipedia article "Prioritarianism" as follows:

(…) "Indeed, like utilitarianism, prioritarianism is a form of aggregative consequentialism; however, it differs from utilitarianism in that it weighs each individual’s well-being before aggregating it into overall well-being."

With this little change you can remove the contradiction between the article "Prioritarianism" and the article "Negative Utilitarianism". Prioritarianism ranks outcomes solely on the basis of overall well-being (as well as utilitarianism), but overall well-being is calculated differently. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.164.104.206 (talk) 09:39, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't think this definition would represent prioritarianism. In fact, I think of utilitarianism in the way you define prioritarianism. --Chealer (talk) 17:45, 25 February 2012 (UTC)