Jacob Watkins-Strand

This paper argues that prospect utilitarianism fails in its promise to offer attractions to utilitarians, sufficientarians, egalitarians and prioritarians alike once we shift our focus from the static allocation of social resources to the dynamic distribution of social burdens. While prospect utilitarianism appears appealing in one-shot “lifeboat scenarios” - where maximizing the number of individuals who reach a sufficiency threshold seems intuitively compelling - it has the potential to also deliver deeply counterintuitive and regressive outcomes in ongoing cooperative contexts. Through its appeal to iterative “shipwreck scenarios”, this paper shows that prospect utilitarianism can structurally require the worst-off to bear the heaviest burdens, effectively institutionalizing a form of functional servitude. Despite its claims to the contrary, when evaluated as a rule for long-term social cooperation, this paper concludes that prospect utilitarianism as currently formulated cannot secure the support of egalitarians or prioritarians.

Robert Nozick recognized that calls for distributive justice represented the most salient justification for extending the state beyond his preferred minimal form. He therefore made it his project to demonstrate that distributive justice could be achieved under the minimal state. Achieving distributive justice, however, requires the effective functioning of the rectification principle: rectification represents the only mechanism that can correct distributions resulting from past injustices that deviate from repeated historical applications of the principles of justice in acquisition and transfer. This makes Nozick’s principle of rectification the linchpin of the minimal state: the success of the minimal state entirely depends on whether it can successfully implement the rectification principle without expanding its state apparatus. In this paper, we demonstrate that under traditional understandings of the minimal state, the rectification principle fails to correct historical injustices even in maximally simplified and charitable scenarios. We propose, and model, a solution—the state as a fractional-reserve lender—that would render the rectification principle many-fold times more effective and robust. This is, however, a consequential modification: while this improved operation of the rectification principle does defend against wholesale extensions of the minimal state, it requires a reconceptualization of the minimal state as consisting of a central bank in addition to its police, courts, and army.