Social Contract, Extended Goodness, and Moral Disagreement

This article discusses the role played by interpersonal comparisons (of utility or goodness) in matters of justice and equity. The role of such interpersonal comparisons has initially been made explicit in the context of social choice theory through the concept of extended preferences. Social choice theorists have generally claimed that extended preferences should be taken as being uniform across a population. Three related claims are made within this perspective. First, though it is sometimes opposed to social choice theory, the social contract approach may also consider the possibility of interpersonal comparisons. This is due to the fact that justice principles may be partially justified on a teleological basis. Second, searching for the uniformity of interpersonal comparisons is both hopeless and useless. In particular, moral disagreement does not originate in the absence of such uniformity. Third, interpersonal comparisons should be accounted for both in social choice and social contract theories in terms of sympathetic identification based on reciprocal respect and tolerance, where each person’s conception of the good partially takes care of others’ good. From the moral point of view, any person’s conception of the good should thus be ‘extended’ to others’ personal conceptions. This extension is, however, limited due to the inherent limitations in sympathetic identification and is a long way from guaranteeing the uniformity assumed by social choice theorists.

Extended Preferences and the Valuation of Health

Measures of health quality used to evaluate governmental policy or to assess a society’s health condition—for example, as an input into cost-effectiveness analysis or the global burden of disease assessment—should take account of the fact that individuals are heterogeneous not only in their health states, but also in their preferences regarding health (the tradeoffs they are willing to make between different health conditions, and between health and longevity). This chapter presents a methodology for measuring health, the “extended preferences” framework, that both defers to individuals’ preferences in the valuation of health, and allows for preference heterogeneity. It is, plausibly, an advance over existing measures (such as quality-adjusted life years and disability-adjusted life years), which as implemented either ignore the preferences of the individuals whose health states are at issue, or assume identical preferences.

Extended Preferences

This chapter presents a methodology for constructing an interpersonally comparable measure of individual well-being, the “extended preferences” approach. It builds upon John Harsanyi’s work. The key idea is that an ethical deliberator makes (or at least is capable of making) judgments concerning the well-being levels of histories and well-being differences between histories—where a history is a hybrid bundle consisting of possible attributes an individual might have, plus possible preference (“tastes”) regarding such attributes. These judgments are represented by a well-being measure. If the deliberator adopts a preference-based conception of well-being, the functional form of that well-being measure can be partly inferred from the utility functions representing the tastes incorporated in histories. That is: the deliberator partly infers what the well-being numbers she assigns to histories must be, given her deference to individual tastes. The chapter also compares the extended-preferences approach to competing methodologies for measuring well-being, in particular the equivalent-income concept.

Equivalent Income

The notion of equivalent income has been elaborated in the specialized context of comparing living standards of individuals in different situations regarding non-income attributes (household size, quality of life, market prices). It is defined as the income that would provide the same satisfaction as the current situation if the non-income attributes took particular reference values. Beyond the comparison of living standards, it deserves to be considered as a philosophically promising solution to the problem of interpersonal comparisons of well-being, for the context of social welfare evaluation. It appears indeed attractive when interpersonal comparisons are meant to respect individual preferences while focusing on objective functionings rather than subjective levels of satisfaction or happiness. In this chapter it is scrutinized and compared to alternative approaches: extended preferences, subjective well-being, capabilities.

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.