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Utilitarianism does not dominate: a response to Chung

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2025

Ryuto Shibata*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan
David Wiens
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, 301 SSB #0521, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0521, USA
*
Corresponding author: Ryuto Shibata; Email: shibatakovich@gmail.com

Abstract

Chung (2023) purports to derive conditions under which a Utilitarian society, which maximizes total welfare, Pareto dominates a Rawlsian society, which maximizes the income of the least advantaged members of society. We show that Chung’s analysis is doubly flawed. First, his analysis assumes that a Rawlsian government chooses an inefficient tax rate when it could do otherwise. Second, his analysis violates his assumption that citizens must choose a non-negative amount of labour. We show that Chung’s headline result does not hold once we enforce this assumption.

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Reply
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Chung, H. 2023. When utilitarianism dominates justice as fairness: an economic defence of utilitarianism from the original position. Economics and Philosophy 39, 308333.10.1017/S0266267122000098CrossRefGoogle Scholar