Christopher Bottomley

Moderate views in distributive ethics, including leading prioritarian and egalitarian views, are those sensitive to both aggregate well-being and inequality to an intermediate degree. Calibration theorems make trouble for leading moderate views by demonstrating that reasonable degrees of aversion to low-stakes inequalities commit these views to extreme degrees of inequality aversion when more well-being is at stake. So, these views face a dilemma: either abandon reasonable low-stakes inequality aversion or accept unreasonable high-stakes inequality aversion. Here, I introduce a new moderate view, Misfortune Aversion, that avoids problematic calibration dilemmas, consistently combining the moderate’s concerns for equality and aggregate well-being.

No existing normative decision theory adequately handles risk. Expected Utility Theory is overly restrictive in prohibiting a range of reasonable preferences. And theories designed to accommodate such preferences (for example, Buchak's (2013) Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory) violate the Betweenness axiom, which requires that you are indifferent to randomizing over two options between which you are already indifferent. Betweenness has been overlooked by philosophers, and we argue that it is a compelling normative constraint. Furthermore, neither Expected nor Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory allow for stakes‐sensitive risk‐attitudes—they require that risk matters in the same way whether you are gambling for loose change or millions of dollars. We provide a novel normative interpretation of Weighted‐Linear Utility Theory that solves all of these problems.