Prioritarian Welfare Functions: an Elaboration and Justification

Apart from Rawls' maximin criterion, there are two main lines of correcting utilitarianism for considerations of distributional justice, egalitarianism (seeking to equalize utilities) and prioritarianism (giving more weight to improving the lot of those worse off). Though many people find prioritarianism appealing until now it has not been elaborated that much. The paper tries to help to fill several gaps remained open. 1. A definition and mathematical distinction of egalitarian and prioritarian welfare functions will be given. 2. In an intuitive discussion of several candidates for prioritarian welfare functions one type of functions that is particularly apt to model prioritarian intuitions is filtered out, namely exponential functions. And some empirical findings are brought in for calibrating the functions' parameter for the degree of priority. 3. An internalistic justification of prioritarianism on the basis of sympathy is developed. Assuming an empirically founded (non-linear) function of our sympathy depending on the other persons' well-being, it can be shown that prioritarianism optimises our sympathetic feelings.