David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Economics and Philosophy 17 (2):147-179 (2001)
Following a long-standing philosophical tradition, impartiality is a distinctive and determining feature of moral judgments, especially in matters of distributive justice. This broad ethical tradition was revived in welfare economics by Vickrey, and above all, Harsanyi, under the form of the so-called Impartial Observer Theorem. The paper offers an analytical reconstruction of this argument and a step-wise philosophical critique of its premisses. It eventually provides a new formal version of the theorem based on subjective probability.
|Keywords||Utilitarianism Impartiality Sympathy Harsanyi Subjective Probability|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
No citations found.
Similar books and articles
Michael H. Robins (1985). Is Fishkins's Critique of Impartial Consequentialism Impartial? Tulane Studies in Philosophy 33:21-26.
Brad Hooker (2010). When is Impartiality Morally Appropriate? In Brian Feltham & John Cottingham (eds.), Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World. Oup Oxford.
Charles Taliaferro (1988). The Environmental Ethics of the Ideal Observer. Environmental Ethics 10 (3):233-250.
Christian List, Some Remarks on the Probability of Cycles - Appendix 3 to 'Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem'.
Mathias Risse (2002). Harsanyi's 'Utilitarian Theorem' and Utilitarianism. Noûs 36 (4):550–577.
Michael Detlefsen (2002). Löb's Theorem as a Limitation on Mechanism. Minds and Machines 12 (3):353-381.
Vernon J. Bourke (1978). The Ethical Role of the Impartial Observer. Journal of Religious Ethics 6 (2):279 - 292.
Peter Coghlan (2005). The Prodigal and His Brother: Impartiality and the Equal Consideration of Interests. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 26 (3):195-206.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads165 ( #4,041 of 1,099,037 )
Recent downloads (6 months)35 ( #2,456 of 1,099,037 )
How can I increase my downloads?