Prospect utilitarianism: A better alternative to sufficientarianism

Philosophical Studies 174 (8):1911-1933 (2017)
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Abstract

Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal” :21–43, 1987), the doctrine of sufficiency has attracted great attention among both ethical theorists and political philosophers. The doctrine of sufficiency consists of two main theses: the positive thesis states that it is morally important for people to have enough; and the negative thesis states that once everybody has enough, relative inequality has absolutely no moral importance. Many political philosophers have presented different versions of sufficientarianism that retain the general spirit of what Frankfurt had proposed in his seminal work. However, all of these different versions of sufficientarianism suffer from two critical problems: they fail to give right answers to lifeboat situations, and they fail to provide continuous ethical judgments. In this paper, I show a version of utilitarianism that solves these problems while retaining the major attractions of sufficientarianism. I call it “prospect utilitarianism.” In addition, I show that prospect utilitarianism can avoid standard objections to utilitarianism and has aspects that can appeal to both prioritarians and egalitarians as well.

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Hun Chung
Waseda University

Citations of this work

The indispensability of sufficientarianism.Anders Herlitz - 2019 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 22 (7):929-942.
What Do ‘Humans’ Need? Sufficiency and Pluralism.Ben Davies - forthcoming - Ethics, Policy and Environment.
The numbers fallacy: rescuing sufficientarianism from arithmeticism.Lasse Nielsen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

What is the point of equality.Elizabeth Anderson - 1999 - Ethics 109 (2):287-337.
Equality and priority.Derek Parfit - 1997 - Ratio 10 (3):202–221.
Equality as a moral ideal.Harry Frankfurt - 1987 - Ethics 98 (1):21-43.
Why sufficiency is not enough.Paula Casal - 2007 - Ethics 117 (2):296-326.

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