Philosophy 1250F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: John Stuart Mill, Negative Number, Act Utilitarianism
13 Sep 2018
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It is hard to do this, especially if we have to make interpersonal comparisons. 2 people might rank a certain favour of ice cream first, but one of them might enjoy it much more than the other. When we move away from psychological pleasure numbers, to the dollar, this is a move that economists tend to want to make. Instead, it is a preference strength based utilitarianism. The strength of your preference is measured by how much you pay. There are still problems even with the preference based utilitarianism, where the strength of the preference is given in terms of the money. We assign this a negative number, to rid of something as opposed to getting it. There is reason to think that money does not have a constant dollar across people. I like apples, i have 10, you offer me one more, i might take it, but it would mean as much to me if i already had 10.
