6 - Group Utility Analysis

Summary

Section 1.1's analysis of a new safety standard's utility for society entertains its division according to people, a traditional dimension of utility analysis. Combining an analysis along this dimension with analyses along the dimensions of goals and possible outcomes yields a threedimensional analysis of the safety standard's social utility. The standard's utility for a person, a point on the dimension of people, may be expanded along the dimension of goals, as in Chapter 2. To accommodate uncertainty, it may be expanded simultaneously along the dimension of possible outcomes, as in Chapter 4. The three dimensions provide a versatile framework for analyses of social utility.

To analyze an action's group utility with respect to people in the group, one has to decide how to add the action's benefits and costs for those people. If a society adopts a new safety standard, some people may benefit because of a reduction in injuries. Others may not benefit personally but still share the new standard's cost. How should the analysis weight these considerations so that they add up to the standard's social utility? This chapter advances a procedure. It argues in a utilitarian vein that an action's group utility is a sum of its interpersonally scaled utilities for the group's members.