11 - Applications

Summary

Part A

To illustrate the practical use of the critical-level utilitarian principles discussed in earlier chapters, we examine their use in two economic models. The first analyzes the problem of allocating a foreign-aid budget to different types of expenditures. In it, we assume that aid received by a developing country can be used to fund consumption or population control (prevention of births) and use a two-period model where population size in period two is determined by the amount spent on population control in period one. The second application examines the use of animals in research and food production. We evaluate various policies with a generalization of critical-level utilitarianism that takes account of the interests of non-human sentient animals and allows critical levels to differ across species. In both applications, population size is treated as a continuous variable to simplify the analysis.

FOREIGN AID AND POPULATION POLICY

Population policy is replete with ethical difficulties (Sen 1994, 1995) and policy decisions are complicated by imperfect knowledge of the effectiveness of policy options. Should we rely, for example, on the free choices of potential parents, improved education, or (possibly coercive) family-planning programs? These conundrums are made worse if there is disagreement about the ethical standards that should be used to evaluate possible outcomes. If policies are evaluated using average utilitarianism, for example, the result will be smaller populations than those recommended by classical utilitarianism.