IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/utilit/v24y2012i03p365-380_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Prioritarianism and the Separateness of Persons

Author

Listed:
  • OTSUKA, MICHAEL

Abstract

For a prioritarian by contrast to a utilitarian, whether a certain quantity of utility falls within the boundary of one person's life or another's makes the following moral difference: the worse the life of a person who could receive a given benefit, the stronger moral reason we have to confer this benefit on this person. It would seem, therefore, that prioritarianism succeeds, where utilitarianism fails, to ‘take seriously the distinction between persons’. Yet I show that, contrary to these appearances, prioritarianism fails, in ways strikingly parallel to those in which utilitarianism fails, to take this distinction seriously. In so doing, I draw on and develop an earlier critique of prioritarianism by disentangling and pressing two distinct separateness-of-persons objections offered there. One objection is that prioritarianism is insensitive to ‘prudential justifications’. The other is that it is insensitive to the competing claims of different individuals.

Suggested Citation

  • Otsuka, Michael, 2012. "Prioritarianism and the Separateness of Persons," Utilitas, Cambridge University Press, vol. 24(3), pages 365-380, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:utilit:v:24:y:2012:i:03:p:365-380_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0953820812000064/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Shlomi Segall, 2024. "To be (disadvantaged) or not to be? An egalitarian guide for creating new people," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 23(2), pages 154-180, May.
    2. Matthew D Adler & Nils Holtug, 2019. "Prioritarianism: A response to critics," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 18(2), pages 101-144, May.
    3. Michael Otsuka, 2018. "How it makes a moral difference that one is worse off than one could have been," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 17(2), pages 192-215, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:utilit:v:24:y:2012:i:03:p:365-380_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/uti .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.