If you’re not making a prioritarian aggregate utility function by summing functions of individual utility functions, the mapping of a prioritarian function to a utility function doesn’t always work. Prioritarian utility functions, for instance, can do things like rank-order everyone’s utility functions and then sum each individual utility raised to the negative-power of the rank-order … or something*. They allow interactions between individual utility functions in the aggregate function that are not facilitated by the direct summing permitted in utilitarianism.
This is a good point. I might want to go back and edit the original post to account for this.
So from a mathematical perspective, it is possible to represent many prioritarian utility function as a conventional utilitarian utility function. However, from an intuitive perspective, they mean different things:
This doesn’t practically affect decision-making of a moral agents but it does reflect different underlying philosophies—which affects the kinds of utility functions people might propose.
Sure, I’ll agree that they’re different in terms of ways of thinking about things, but I thought it was worth pointing out that in terms of what they actually propose they are largely indistinguishable without further constraints.
This is a good point. I might want to go back and edit the original post to account for this.
Sure, I’ll agree that they’re different in terms of ways of thinking about things, but I thought it was worth pointing out that in terms of what they actually propose they are largely indistinguishable without further constraints.