This article gets at the basic idea of a subfield of economics called "welfare economics". The general problem is, how do you combine individual well-beings into an aggregate to make decisions that affect multiple people? We can also answer questions like "Given certain assumptions about bargaining outcomes (nash equilibria etc) what aggregation function will rational actors come to on their own?"
This article presents a "priority view" as a contrasting moral view to "pure utilitarianism" and wonders why the view hasn't caught on outside of moral philosophy. The answer is that it has, and outside of philosophy we have models of aggregate utility that subsume both of the moral views in the article. This was a very active field from the 1930s-1970s, and now most of the interesting work here IMO is done in the cryptocurrency space (trying to find ways to prevent forks or incentivize participants to be pro-social).
The two points of view described in this article are just two specific "social welfare functions" we could optimize for. There are many others.
The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory, or the "Rawlsian" social welfare function (maximize the minimum individual utility):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_bargaining
The "pure utilitarianism" view is not a bargaining solution, but it's known as the "Benthamite" social welfare function (maximize the sum of individual utilities).
This article presents a "priority view" as a contrasting moral view to "pure utilitarianism" and wonders why the view hasn't caught on outside of moral philosophy. The answer is that it has, and outside of philosophy we have models of aggregate utility that subsume both of the moral views in the article. This was a very active field from the 1930s-1970s, and now most of the interesting work here IMO is done in the cryptocurrency space (trying to find ways to prevent forks or incentivize participants to be pro-social).
The two points of view described in this article are just two specific "social welfare functions" we could optimize for. There are many others.
The "priority view" in this article is known as the "Kalai egalitarian bargaining solution" in economics and game theory, or the "Rawlsian" social welfare function (maximize the minimum individual utility):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_bargaining
The "pure utilitarianism" view is not a bargaining solution, but it's known as the "Benthamite" social welfare function (maximize the sum of individual utilities).