UNIVERSITY SEMINAR ON LOGIC, PROBABILITY, AND GAMES
A New Framework for Aggregating Utility
Kenny Easwaran (Texas A&M University)
4:10 pm, Friday, March 11, 2016
Faculty House, Columbia University
Abstract. It is often assumed that a natural way to aggregate utility over multiple agents is by addition. When there are infinitely many agents, this leads to various problems. Vallentyne and Kagan approach this problem by providing a partial ordering over outcomes, rather than a numerical aggregate value. Bostrom and Arntzenius both argue that without a numerical value, it is difficult to integrate this aggregation into our best method for considering acts with risky outcomes: expected value.
My 2014 paper, “Decision Theory without Representation Theorems”, describes a project for evaluating risky acts that extends expected value to cases where it is infinite or undefined. The project of this paper is to extend this methodology in a way that deals with risk and aggregation across agents simultaneously, instead of giving priority to one or the other as Bostrom and Arntzenius require. The result is still merely a partial ordering, but since it already includes all considerations of risk and aggregation, there is no further need for particular numerical representations.
Formal Philosophy 