Gustaf Arrhenius

In his Populist Democracy: A Defence (1993), Torbjörn Tännsjö suggests, roughly, the following necessary and sufficient conditions for a democratic collective choice: If the majority of a given group of voters prefer A to B, then the collective choice is A rather than B; and if the majority of voters had preferred B to A, then the collective choice would have been B rather than A. Moreover, the preference of a voter is equated with the one she is showing by the act of voting (e.g., by putting a ballot in a box). Tännsjö’s definition has the advantage of being simple, naturalistic, and, to the best of my knowledge, more exact that most other definitions proposed in the literature. As such, I think it is a useful starting point for a discussion of how to define democratic decision making. As we will see below, such a discussion can be quite illuminating and generate interesting and fruitful questions regarding how to understand democracy. Tännsjö claims that his definition is in line with common language use, i.e., that it is a lexical definition. Pace Tännsjö, I shall show that it departs from common language use since it has a number of counterintuitive implications in regards to which decisions and methods that are classified as democratic or undemocratic. I shall suggest a number of amendments to avoid these drawbacks and incorporate these amendments in a definition of a democratic collective choice. The result is a definition of a democratic decision that is superior to Tännsjö’s, or so we will argue. It will be acknowledged, however, that it still has some shortcomings that future efforts need to rectify, or that it might not be possible to give a 1 simple and naturalistic definition of democracy that is sufficiently in line with common language use. To avoid a possible misunderstanding, let me add that I don’t think there is necessarily one correct way of defining a democratic decision (although there might be a common kernel) and I certainly don’t suggest that the definition proposed here is the only way of explicating the ordinary language use of the term “democracy”..

What is the role of equality in the evaluation of populations of different sizes in respect to their goodness? The field of population ethics has been riddled with paradoxes which purport to show that our considered beliefs are inconsistent in cases where the number of people and their welfare varies. Parfit's well-known Mere Addition Paradox is a case in point. These paradoxes challenge at a fundamental level the existence of a satisfactory theory of our duties to future generations and intergenerational justice. This chapter discusses whether egalitarian concerns can help us solve these paradoxes. It is claimed that whereas egalitarian considerations are applicable in different number cases and can help us solve the Mere Addition Paradox, such considerations are not of much help in another paradox. The implications of the Priority View in different number cases are also examined.

It seems to be a widespread opinion that increasing the length of existing happy lives is better than creating new happy lives although the total welfare is the same in both cases, and that it may be better even when the total welfare is lower in the outcome with extended lives. I shall discuss two interesting suggestion that seems to support this idea, or so it has been argued. Firstly, the idea there is a positive level of wellbeing above which a life has to reach to have positive contributive value to a population, so-called Critical Level Utilitarianism. Secondly, the view that it makes an outcome worse if people are worse off than they otherwise could have been, a view I call Comparativism. I shall show that although these theories do capture some of our intuitions about the value of longevity, they have such counterintuitive implications in other cases that we ultimately have to reject them.

Total Utilitarianism is the view that an action is right if and only if it maximizes the sum total of people’s well-being. A common objection to Total Utilitarianism is that it is insensitive to matters of distributive justice. For example, for a given amount of well-being, Total Utilitarianism is indifferent between an equal distribution and any unequal distribution, and if there would be a tiny gain in well-being by moving from an equal distribution to an unequal, we have a duty to do so. To meet the objection from justice, Fred Feldman has suggested a desert adjusted version of Total Utilitarianism ---‘Justicism’ --- which in addition to the value of wellbeing takes into account factors concerning people’s desert.1 Feldman’s suggestion is novel and interesting but his theory has been severely criticized as a theory of distributive justice.2 In the present paper, I shall try to salvage what I think might be a kernel of truth in Feldman’s suggestion, or at least a kernel that is worthy of further investigation.

The long sweep of human history has involved a continuing interaction between peoples' efforts to improve their well-being and the environment's stability to sustain those efforts. Throughout most of that history, the interactions between human development and the environment have been relatively simple and local affairs. But the complexity and scale of those interactions are increasing. What were once local incidents of pollution shared throughout a common watershed or air basin now involve multile nations - witness the concerns for acid desposition in Europe and North America. What were once acute episodes of relatively reversible damage now affect multiple generations - witness the debates over disposal of chemical and radioactive wastes.

The person-affecting restriction, in its slogan form, states that an outcome can be better than another only if it is better for someone. It has a strong intuitive appeal and several theorists have suggested that it avoids certain counterintuitive implications in population ethics. At the same time, the restriction has highly counterintuitive implications and yields non-transitive orderings in some nonidentity cases. Many theorists have taken this criticism to be decisive. Recently, however, there have been some reformulations of the restriction, suggesting that the restriction survives this “old” criticism. This paper investigates the viability of those reformulations, which are versions of “Comparativism,” and argues that most of them either have counterintuitive implications or are extensionally equivalent with impersonal theories, but that “Soft Comparativism” seems to have an advantage over impersonal theories.