Matthew Adler (Duke University): Prioritarianism and Climate Change

Abstract: “Prioritarianism” is an ethical view that has been much discussed in recent normative ethics and theoretical welfare economics, but thus far has had little impact on climate change scholarship. The view gives greater weight to well-being changes affecting those at lower well-being levels. Formalized as a social welfare function (SWF), prioritarianism sums a strictly concave function of individual utilities–by contrast with the utilitarian SWF, which simply adds up utilities, and which is currently the workhorse SWF for climate change scholarship. In this talk, I present the prioritarian SWF, and describe a number of ways in which prioritarianism and utilitarianism may diverge with respect to climate policy.