Can Consequentialists Honour the Special Moral Status of Persons? Academic Article

abstract

• It is widely believed that consequentialists are committed to the claim that persons are mere containers for well-being. In this article I challenge this view by proposing a new version of consequentialism, according to which the identities of persons matter. The new theory, two-dimensional prioritarianism, is a natural extension of traditional prioritarianism. Two-dimensional prioritarianism holds that well-being matters more for persons who are at a low absolute level than for persons who are at a higher level and that it is worse to be deprived of a given number of units than it is good to gain the same number of units, even if the new distribution is a permutation of the original one. If a fixed amount of well-being is transferred from one person to another and then transferred back again, two-dimensional prioritarianism implies that it would have been better to preserve the status quo.

authors

• Peterson, Martin

published proceedings

• Utilitas

author list (cited authors)

• PETERSON, M.

citation count

• 1

complete list of authors

• PETERSON, MARTIN

publication date

• December 2010

publisher

• Cambridge University Press (CUP)  Publisher

published in

• Utilitas  Journal

keywords

• 50 Philosophy And Religious Studies
• 5003 Philosophy

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1017/s0953820810000336

start page

• 434

end page

• 446

volume

• 22

issue

• 4

URL

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0953820810000336