Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

EXTENDED PREFERENCES AND INTERPERSONAL COMPARISONS: A NEW ACCOUNT

EXTENDED PREFERENCES AND INTERPERSONAL COMPARISONS: A NEW ACCOUNT This paper builds upon, but substantially revises, John Harsanyi's concept of ‘extended preferences’. An individual ‘history’ is a possible life that some person (a subject) might lead. Harsanyi supposes that a given spectator, formulating her ethical preferences, can rank histories by empathetic projection: putting herself ‘in the shoes’ of various subjects. Harsanyi then suggests that interpersonal comparisons be derived from the utility function representing spectators’ (supposedly common) ranking of history lotteries. Unfortunately, Harsanyi's proposal has various flaws, including some that have hitherto escaped scholarly attention. In particular, it ignores the limits of personal identity. If the subject has welfare-relevant attributes that the spectator cannot acquire without changing who she is, full empathetic identification of the latter with the former becomes impossible. This paper proposes instead to use sympathy as the attitude on a spectator's part that allows us to make sense of her extended preferences. Sympathy – an attitude of care and concern – is a psychological state quite different from empathy. We should also allow for hetereogeneity in spectators’ extended preferences. Interpersonal comparisons emerge from a plurality of sympathetic spectators, not (as per Harsanyi) from a common empathetic ranking. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Economics & Philosophy Cambridge University Press

EXTENDED PREFERENCES AND INTERPERSONAL COMPARISONS: A NEW ACCOUNT

Adler, Matthew D.
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 30 (2): 40 – Jun 2, 2014
Download PDF
40 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/cambridge-university-press/extended-preferences-and-interpersonal-comparisons-a-new-account-0PmeIq0OGp

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 
ISSN
1474-0028
eISSN
0266-2671
DOI
10.1017/S0266267114000133
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This paper builds upon, but substantially revises, John Harsanyi's concept of ‘extended preferences’. An individual ‘history’ is a possible life that some person (a subject) might lead. Harsanyi supposes that a given spectator, formulating her ethical preferences, can rank histories by empathetic projection: putting herself ‘in the shoes’ of various subjects. Harsanyi then suggests that interpersonal comparisons be derived from the utility function representing spectators’ (supposedly common) ranking of history lotteries. Unfortunately, Harsanyi's proposal has various flaws, including some that have hitherto escaped scholarly attention. In particular, it ignores the limits of personal identity. If the subject has welfare-relevant attributes that the spectator cannot acquire without changing who she is, full empathetic identification of the latter with the former becomes impossible. This paper proposes instead to use sympathy as the attitude on a spectator's part that allows us to make sense of her extended preferences. Sympathy – an attitude of care and concern – is a psychological state quite different from empathy. We should also allow for hetereogeneity in spectators’ extended preferences. Interpersonal comparisons emerge from a plurality of sympathetic spectators, not (as per Harsanyi) from a common empathetic ranking.

Journal

Economics & Philosophy – Cambridge University Press

Published: Jun 2, 2014

References

  • Reconciling introspective utility with revealed preference: experimental arguments based on prospect theory
    Barrios, C.; Wakker, P. P.
  • Extended sympathy and the possibility of social choice
  • Well-being
  • The elimination of personal identity
  • Empathy, sympathy, care
  • Toward fin de siècle ethics: some trends
    Gibbard, A.; Railton, P.
  • A quasiordering is the intersection of orderings
    Weymark, J. A.
  • On the multi-utility representation of preference relations
    Ok, E. A.
  • Identification and economic behavior: sympathy and empathy in historical perspective
  • The ignorant observer
    Kandil, F.
  • Sympathy, simulation, and the impartial spectator
  • Generalized utilitarianism and Harsanyi's impartial observer theorem
  • Equally-distributed equivalent utility, ex post egalitarianism and utilitarianism
  • A generalized representation theorem for Harsanyi's (‘impartial’) observer
  • Cardinal utility in welfare economics and in the theory of risk-taking
  • Cardinal welfare, individualistic ethics, and interpersonal comparisons of utility
  • Preference satisfaction and welfare economics
    McPherson, M. S.
  • The limits of well-being
  • The puzzle of imaginative desire
  • Strength of preference and cardinal utility
  • Attitudes de dicto and de se
  • The impartial observer theorem of social ethics
  • Imagination and the I
  • Persistence and the first-person perspective
  • Non-dictatorial extensive social choice
    Lauwers, L.
  • Self-interest and the concept of self-sacrifice
  • Morality, self-interest, and reasons for being moral
  • The problem of the essential indexical
  • Imagining oneself to be another
  • Harsanyi's ‘utilitarian theorem’ and utilitarianism
  • Objective interpersonal comparisons of utility
  • Essential properties and individual essences
  • Welfare inequalities and Rawlsian axiomatics
  • Dispositional theories of value
    Lewis, D.; Johnston, M.
  • Self to self
  • Book review (M.D. Adler, Well-Being and Fair Distribution)
  • Measurement theory and the foundations of utilitarianism