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Xodarap comments on A Pure Math Argument for Total Utilitarianism - Less Wrong Discussion

-5 Post author: Xodarap 27 October 2013 05:05PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 27 October 2013 07:05:23PM *  0 points [-]

If the inequitable society has greater total utility, it must be at least as good as the equitable one.

Well, yes. The badness of inequality will show up in the utilities. Once you've mapped states of society onto utilities, you've already taken it into account. You still need an additional empirical argument to say anything interesting (for example, that a society with an equal distribution of wealth is not as good as a society with slightly more total wealth in an inequitable distribution; that may or may not be what you had in mind, but it seemed worth clarifying).

Comment author: Xodarap 27 October 2013 07:30:31PM 1 point [-]

The badness of inequality will show up in the utilities

Sure. This is probably not a majority opinion on LW, but there are a lot of people who believe that equality is good even beyond utility maximization (c.f. Rawls). That's what I was trying to get at when I said:

In fact, it is so bad that there are circumstances where increasing equality is good even if people are, on average, worse off.

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