Forthcoming in Social Choice and Welfare

In this extraordinarily thorough and thoughtful work, Matthew Adler proves himself a grandmaster of the moral evaluation of public policy. The core idea of the book is that largescale public policies should be designed to maximize the expectation of a continuous prioritarian social welfare function (SWF). In other words, they should maximize the expectation of the sum-total of transformed individual utilities, where the transformation gives greater weight to increases in utility the worse off an individual is in absolute terms. (Formally, a continuous prioritarian SWF holds that outcome x is at least as good as outcome y iff, for every utility function u(.) in the set of utility functions U that represent individual well-being, ∑ gg(uuii(xx)) ≥ ∑ gg(uuii(yy)) ii=1 ii=1 , where g(.) is a strictly increasing and strictly concave function. If mm(xx) is a moral value function that evaluates outcomes in this manner, then, on Adler’s view, public policy a is at least as good as policy b iff, for a given outcome set O and a probability function ππaa(. ) linking any given policy a with any outcome, ∑ ππaa xx∈OO (xx)mm(xx) ≥ ∑ ππbb xx∈OO (xx)mm(xx).) The heart of this proposal is simple, and close to ideas proposed by others, most notably Derek Parfit (2002; 2012). The genius of this work lies in the painstaking and creative way it is justified and operationalized. In what follows, I shall summarize the book and critically analyze a few key arguments.