It seems obvious that the prioritarian argument is tricking moral intuitions, because of the easy confusion between utils and objectively valuable commodities such as money. Those commodities involve diminishing marginal utility. Utils don't, by definition.
I wonder how unintuitive this actually is. It seems like our supposedly prioritarian intuitions are motivated largely by concerns about diminishing returns (e.g. we should give the $100 to a poor person rather than a rich person, because it will do more good if given to the poor person). But when these considerations are removed, and we ask a question like "is giving 99 utils to x better than giving 100 utils to y, assuming x is worse off than y," then I'm sure that we actually DO have prioritarian intuitions.
Well, part of the idea of the post seems to be that we have "strong prioritarian intuitions." But I'm not actually sure that this is true; I think the reason we generally think that you should favor helping the less well-off is that it will produce more overall good, not that the same amount of good is somehow intrinsically better when allocated to the less well-off. I'm not sure, though.
It seems obvious that the prioritarian argument is tricking moral intuitions, because of the easy confusion between utils and objectively valuable commodities such as money. Those commodities involve diminishing marginal utility. Utils don't, by definition.
I wonder how unintuitive this actually is. It seems like our supposedly prioritarian intuitions are motivated largely by concerns about diminishing returns (e.g. we should give the $100 to a poor person rather than a rich person, because it will do more good if given to the poor person). But when these considerations are removed, and we ask a question like "is giving 99 utils to x better than giving 100 utils to y, assuming x is worse off than y," then I'm sure that we actually DO have prioritarian intuitions.
I'm not quite sure what you're suggesting, could you clarify?
Well, part of the idea of the post seems to be that we have "strong prioritarian intuitions." But I'm not actually sure that this is true; I think the reason we generally think that you should favor helping the less well-off is that it will produce more overall good, not that the same amount of good is somehow intrinsically better when allocated to the less well-off. I'm not sure, though.
Oh, yeah, plausibly,