Comment on Is Equality Really about Diminishing Marginal Utility?

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 01:05:48 GMT

You want to give it some, but not all, of the resources.

Right, one has to arbitrate between harmful components of various utility monsters (UM) (which most people are in the approximation of limited resources) somehow. But you should not need to kill or torture people just because the UM enjoys it a lot.

Now, how to optimize harmful preferences? If there are enough resources to saturate every non-UM utility, then there is no problem. If there isn't enough, the linear programming approach would reduce every non-UM to "life barely worth celebrating" and give the rest to the hungriest UM. Whether this is a good solution, I do not know.

If you try to use references to property distinctions inside the utility function to do that, you've disqualified your utility function from the role of distinguishing good and bad legal and economic systems, and epistemology explodes.

I did not follow that, feel free to give an example.

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