Informed preference consequentialism, contractarianism and libertarian paternalism: on Harsanyi, Rawls and Robert Sugden
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Informed preference consequentialism, contractarianism and libertarian paternalism: on Harsanyi, Rawls and Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage Mozaffar Qizilbash1 Received: 8 June 2020 / Accepted: 24 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Robert Sugden abandons certain central tenets of traditional welfare economics and recommends a contractarian alternative. He rejects ‘Libertarian Paternalism’ (LP) and related ‘paternalistic’ proposals. The seeds of ‘paternalism’ inspired by the findings of behavioural economics can be found in informed preference views associated with J.S. Mill and John Harsanyi. Nonetheless, those who endorse a combination of the informed preference view of welfare, consequentialism and welfarism— ‘informed preference consequentialists’—have good reasons to resist the agenda of LP. John Rawls adopts a variation of the informed preference view. Contracting parties in his theory accept ‘paternalistic principles’. Sugden’s claim that contractarians cannot be ‘paternalists’ does not generalise to all contractarian theories. Sugden’s and Rawls’ contractarian positions are in important respects different. Keywords Consequentialism · Contractarianism · Welfare · Paternalism · Behavioural economics JEL Classification A12 · D60 · D61 · D63 · D90
1 Introduction In The Community of Advantage and related works, Sugden (1989, 2018a, p. 17) rejects some of the central tenets of the utilitarian heritage of welfare economics. These include two views which utilitarians endorse: (1) consequentialism—the view that the right action, rule or motive is one which leads to the outcome or state of affairs which is best (or no worse than any other) and; (2) welfarism—the view that the relative goodness of different outcomes or states of affairs depends * Mozaffar Qizilbash [email protected] 1
Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York YO10 5DD, England
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only on the levels of individual welfare in those outcomes or states (see Sen 1979, pp. 463–468). He also abandons the view that a person’s advantage should be evaluated in terms of the satisfaction of her preferences. Sugden (2018a, p. 17) hopes to ‘encourage the reader to wonder whether there is merit in alternative approaches’. Sugden (2018a, p. 19) suggests that traditional welfare economics is wedded to a peculiar ‘view from nowhere’—a term he borrows from Nagel (1986)—which involves taking the imaginary perspective of an ‘impartially benevolent spectator’, and which ‘attempts to filter out one’s private interests and biases’. Consequentialism is sometimes defined so that it takes precisely this sort of view. For example, Samuel Sheffler writes that: ‘[c]onsequentialism in its purest and simplest form is a moral doctrine which says that the right act in any given situation is the one that will produce the best overall outcome, as judged from an impersonal standpoint which gives equal weight to the interests of everyone’ (Sheffler 1988, p. 1). Sugden (2018a, p. 20) also
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