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37The Equivalence of Egalitarianism and PrioritarianismJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22 (1). 2022.In this essay I argue that even though egalitarianism and prioritarianism are different theories of social welfare, they can use the same social welfare measures. I present six different arguments for this thesis. The first argument is that conceptual connections between egalitarianism and prioritarianism ensure that any measure that works for either theory works for both. The second argument is that conditions necessary and sufficient to identify egalitarian and prioritarian measures, respectiv…Read more
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66Measuring Social Welfare by Proximity to an Optimum PopulationPacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (1): 217-249. 2023.This essay introduces a new type of measure of social welfare, where populations are evaluated by their resemblance to an optimum population, which is an (in principle) possible population with the highest degree of social welfare, relative to some circumstances. Here it is argued to be the largest possible population where everyone fares maximally well. The new measure is responsive to quality of welfare, equality of welfare, and the number of people. It satisfies dominance and negative monoton…Read more
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289Quantity, quality, equality: introducing a new measure of social welfareSocial Choice and Welfare 57 (3). 2021.In this essay I propose a new measure of social welfare. It captures the intuitive idea that quantity, quality, and equality of individual welfare all matter for social welfare. More precisely, it satisfies six conditions: Equivalence, Dominance, Quality, Strict Monotonicity, Equality and Asymmetry. These state that i) populations equivalent in individual welfare are equal in social welfare; ii) a population that dominates another in individual welfare is better; iii) a population that has a hig…Read more
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82Measures of SimilarityTheoria 86 (1): 73-99. 2020.This article analyses the relationship between the concept of single aspect similarity and proposed measures of similarity. More precisely, it compares eleven measures of similarity in terms of how well they satisfy a list of desiderata, chosen to capture common intuitions concerning the properties of similarity and the relations between similarity and dissimilarity. Three types of measures are discussed: similarity as commonality, similarity as a function of dissimilarity, and similarity as a j…Read more
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70Measures of Freedom of ChoiceDissertation, Uppsala university. 2012.The thesis studies the problem of measuring freedom of choice. It analyzes the concept of freedom of choice, discusses conditions that a measure should satisfy, and introduces a new class of measures that uniquely satisfy ten proposed conditions.
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67Measuring OpportunityIn Rysiek Sliwinski & Frans Svensson (eds.), Neither/Nor, Uppsala University. pp. 53-68. 2011.In this essay I discuss a person’s freedom to choose whatever that person may reasonably prefer to choose. This type of freedom of choice may be regarded as a candidate for a social good, being a hybrid between freedom of choice and preference satisfaction utility. To separate this preference dependent freedom of choice from other types, we may call it opportunity. The essay is concerned with the question of how opportunity should be identified and measured. I discuss what conditions an opportun…Read more