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AbstractA dialogue, in three parts, on utilitarian vulnerability to exploitation.

AbstractPrioritarianism is a variant of utilitarianism. It differs from utilitarianism in that benefiting individuals matters more the worse off these individuals are. On this view, there are two standard ways of handling risky prospects: Ex-PostPrioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off in final outcomes and then values prospects by the expectation of the sum total of those adjusted values, whereas Ex-AntePrioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off on each individual's expectation and then values prospects by the sum total of those adjusted expectations. A standard objection to Ex-PostPrioritarianism is that it violates Ex-AntePareto, that is, it prescribes choices that worsen the expectations for everyone. In this article, I argue that Ex-AntePrioritarianism suffers from much the same problem: it violates a sequential version of Ex-AntePareto, that is, it prescribes sequences of choices that worsen the expectations for everyone.

The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation, For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living. (Parfit 1984: 388)

If ‘F’ is a predicate, then ‘Fer than’ or ‘more Fthan’ is a corresponding comparative relational predicate. Concerning such comparative relations, John Broome's Collapsing Principle states that, for any xand y, if it is false that yis Fer than xand not false that xis Fer than y, then it is true that xis Fer than y. Luke Elson has recently put forward two counter-examples to this principle, allegedly showing that it yields contradictions if there are borderline cases. In this article, I argue that the Collapsing Principle does not rule out borderline cases, but I also argue that the principle is implausible.

The standard argument for the claim that rational preferences are transitive is the pragmatic money-pump argument. However, a money-pump only exploits agents with cyclic strict preferences. In order to pump agents who violate transitivity but without a cycle of strict preferences, one needs to somehow induce such a cycle. Methods for inducing cycles of strict preferences from non-cyclic violations of transitivity have been proposed in the literature, based either on offering the agent small monetary transaction premiums or on multi-dimensional preferences. This paper argues that previous proposals have been flawed and presents a new approach based on the dominance principle.