Belief-averaged relative utilitarianism
I consider social welfare functions when the preferences of individual agents and society maximize subjective expected utility. A system of axioms is introduced whose unique solution is the social welfare function that averages the agents’ beliefs and adds up their utility functions, normalized so that they have the same range. The first distinguishing axiom requires that an act about which beliefs agree becomes socially more preferred if it gains support among the agents. The second is a weakening of Arrow’s independence of irrelevant alternatives that applies only to subsets of acts that make every outside act redundant.

You can sign up for a 30-minute meeting with the speaker on Friday 11 December using this spreadsheet: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vrk4zZ1ZHgoNeUiLxU2_zbAamcKhgNqxTGky1e51oYU/edit#gid=0. You must sign up before noon on Monday 7 December.
Date: 10 December 2020, 15:00 (Thursday, 9th week, Michaelmas 2020)
Venue: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NGNmMjcwOTItMzdkMi00ZDBhLTgwNGYtODcxYTc1ODMwZTJi%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22dbbf04e0-0223-45f1-93fd-51ea2b95f0ae%22%7d
Speaker: Florian Brandl
Organising department: Department of Economics
Organiser contact email address: gpi-office@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: William Drummond