Utilitarianism is often rejected on the grounds that it fails to respect the separateness of persons, instead treating people as mere "receptacles of value". I develop several different versions of this objection, and argue that--despite their prima facie plausibility--they are all mistaken. Although there are crude forms of utilitarianism that run afoul of these objections, I advance a new form of the view--'token-pluralistic utilitarianism'--that does not.
This is my favourite of my papers to date, so I'm especially glad that it found such a good home!
Posts
Congratulations! I've only read it over once, but it really is a good paper. I've often thought that one of the strengths of classical utilitarianism is that it has clear marks of being broadly of the sort you call token-pluralistic -- both Bentham and Mill start not with aggregate value but value for individuals and then add principles for aggregation to this; this is especially clear in Mill and, I think, essential to his distinction between higher and lower pleasures and to his account of the Art of Life -- and that one of the problems with many of the fancier versions since is that they obscure or lose sight of this.
ReplyDelete