Paretian welfare economics is generally understood as a mere variant of classical utilitarianism which rests on a specific set of assumptions about the information which is available to decision makers. But it is shown here that a deeper alteration of the meaning of the theory results from these assumptions when they are properly taken into account by means of an implicit but insufficiently recognized principle of “informational validity”. If this principle is duly applied, Paretian prescriptions coincide with liberal judgments and Paretian welfare economics can basically be viewed as a way to give a consequentialist content to deontological liberalism.
Tag: utilitarianism
Ethical Requirements and the tarification à l’activité in Hospital
The difficulty for physicians to integrate the ethical criterion of distributive justice in their decision making is partly due to the emotions sparked off by patients’ countenance. The concern for a rational distribution of sanitary resources according to the needs of the community doesn’t match with the emotional intensity of compassion. The gradual integration of fixing a price scale for a given medical activity in hospitals offers the advantage of balancing the influence of spontaneous emotions in the medical decision. Yet, the drawback lies in the favouring of profitability rather than distributive justice.
The Moral Theory of Condillac: A Path toward Utilitarianism
Contrary to those of his brother, Mably, Condillac’s thoughts on morality are not considered to be among his most successful undertakings. Right from the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment until the present day, none of the great scholars who studied or continue to study his philosophical works have paid much attention to the author’s thoughts on this matter. It took two recent PhD theses to question this point. However, these two studies of Condillac’s ideas on morality diverge somewhat. The first focuses mainly on his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) and concludes that Condillac had a specific ethical morality. The second interpretation, which bases itself on the role of one’s needs and one’s “estimation of pleasure and pain,” tries to fit Condillac’s notion of morality into a more utilitarian perspective. Clearly based on this last perspective, the first objective of this article is to present how the principles of human association (the “state of nature” and the “contract”) and morality are linked in Condillac’s works and how both result from man’s need for self-preservation. We shall then see how Condillac proposes a true “moral calculation” which leads individuals to act in a virtuous manner, their sole objective being to satisfy their self-interest. We will conclude by situating this moral theory halfway between Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui’s conceptions and those of the French utilitarians of the second half of the 18th century, bearing in mind that Condillac’s ideas, when compared with the ideas of natural law theorists, constitute a step forward toward a consequentialist moral theory.