Discussing in Term of Utilitarian Justice.

Faculty of Economics

SPbSU

Part 1.

Discussing in term of Utilitarian justice.

Utilitarian justice theory or utilitarism is one of welfarist school of thought. But utilitarist also uses word welfare to analyze and understand who will be worse off or better of after certain policies, like pension reform for example.

Utilitarist uses either sum of utility functions of all individuals, or their average to maximize total welfare:

[pic] or

[pic]

There are two specialties in these equalities:

1. Variables that determine utility (or welfare) of person i we do not determine.

2. We treat each person equally (each person contributes equally in total welfare).

These are the general assumptions about utilitarism.

A) Discussing free nursery schools.

Assume N is population of a country; each person has his own utility function[pic], where Y is an income of this person. Let [pic]be an additional tax for free nursery schools. If a person have opportunity to take his kid to nursery school, he can work (and not sit with his baby) and earn additional [pic] money unit is. We divide N people into two groups:

First group, 1:k, will get benefit from free nursery schools. (These are poor people, who do not have money for private nursery school, or people who’s [pic]is less then private nursery school cost.)

Second group, k+1:N, are people who don’t and are not going to have children, or people whose children are out of nursery school age. This group of people don’t get will not ever get any benefit from free nursery schools.

So, utility of person j from the first group before nursery schools were free was[pic]. After introducing free nursery schools it equals to[pic], so additional utility of one from first group, [pic]can be calculated:

[pic][pic]-[pic]

And additional welfare of society:

+[pic]= [pic][1]

For those in the group two utility lost after introducing free nursery schools can be calculated...