Ethics, Game Theory, Public Choice, and Distributive Justice

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering Utilitarianism, Effective Altruism, Game Theory, Public Choice Theory, Gerrymandering, and Rawlsian Distributive Justice.

Sum Total

A foundational component of utilitarianism that aggregates or adds together the overall welfare across all members of a society.

Maximization

A foundational component of utilitarianism requiring that actions or policies produce the greatest possible aggregate sum of welfare rather than settling for a sub-optimal amount.

Consequentialism

A core moral principle of utilitarianism holding that choices, actions, and policies are judged solely by the outcomes or consequences they produce.

Welfarism

A core component of utilitarianism asserting that the only relevant currency or consequence for moral evaluation is well-being or welfare.

Cost-Benefit Analysis (Sandel's Critique)

A decision-making method critiqued by Michael Sandel using the Philip Morris and Ford Pinto cases to argue that placing monetary values on human life and suffering is morally unacceptable.

Value of a Statistical Life (VSL)

A quantified metric used in policy decisions to weigh the financial cost of infrastructure safety improvements (such as road safety) against the expected number of human lives saved.

Act Utilitarianism

A form of utilitarianism evaluating each specific individual action directly by its consequences, which is vulnerable to condoning actions that violate fundamental rights or deeply held moral principles.

Rule Utilitarianism

A form of utilitarianism holding that actions must conform to established general rules of justice that secure long-term utility and social stability, though it faces objections when rules conflict.

Mill's Qualitative Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill's defense against the 'philosophy of the swine' objection, asserting that the quality of pleasures matters and that it is 'better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.'

Nozick's Experience Machine

A thought experiment by Robert Nozick challenging hedonic utilitarianism by arguing that people value genuine reality and actually accomplishing goals rather than merely experiencing simulated pleasure.

Scanlon's Transmitter Room Case

T. M. Scanlon's thought experiment involving Jones trapped under broadcasting equipment during a World Cup match, showing that severe individual suffering cannot be justified by aggregating small benefits across millions of viewers.

Effective Altruism

A utilitarian-based philosophy treating charitable donation as a strict moral obligation and encouraging high-earning careers (such as banking) in order to maximize the quantity of resources given to save lives.

Impartiality Requirement

A utilitarian condition dictating that every individual's welfare counts equally, requiring moral agents to assist distant strangers just as much as those who are near.

Dominant Strategy

A strategy in game theory that yields the strictly superior payoff for a player regardless of the strategy chosen by the opposing player.

Prisoners' Dilemma

A game where both players possess a dominant strategy to defect ('rat'), leading to a dominant strategy equilibrium payoff of $(1,1)$ that is socially suboptimal compared to mutual cooperation at $(2,2)$.

Public Goods Game

An $n$-person version of the Prisoners' Dilemma in which individual rational self-interest leads players to free-ride, resulting in a suboptimal outcome known as the tragedy of the commons.

Altruism (Public Goods)

A motivation for cooperation in repeated public goods games where individuals voluntarily contribute because they identify with the common good.

Reciprocity (Public Goods)

A motivation for cooperation in repeated public goods games where an individual contributes to encourage others to contribute, yielding long-term mutual benefits.

Inequality Aversion (Public Goods)

A motivation for contributing in a public goods game driven by a player's desire to increase overall social equality across participants.

Social Norms (Public Goods)

A motivation for contributing in a public goods game grounded in adherence to a shared social expectation that members ought to act in the interest of the common good.

Nash Equilibrium

A strategy profile in which each player's action is a best reply to the other players' strategies, meaning no player has an incentive to unilaterally deviate.

Coordination Game

A game characterized by multiple pure-strategy Nash equilibria where players achieve superior payoffs by harmonizing their actions, such as two farmers coordinating crop choices to avoid market gluts.

Battle of the Sexes

A coordination game featuring two pure-strategy Nash equilibria where both players prefer coordinating on the same activity (e.g., 'His movie' or 'Her movie'), but each player prefers a different coordinated outcome.

Hawk-Dove Game (Game of Chicken)

A strategic model featuring two asymmetric Nash equilibria where mutual aggression (Hawk/crash) causes mutual destruction ($0,0$), compelling one player to concede (Dove/chicken out) while the other dominates.

Public Choice Theory

The economic analysis of political behavior based on the core premise that political actors in the public forum are driven by self-interest just as much as economic actors in the marketplace.

Rational Ignorance

Anthony Downs's concept that it is rational for voters to remain uninformed and abstain from voting because acquiring political information requires high time investments while the probability of a single vote altering an election is negligible.

Condorcet Jury Theorem

A mathematical theorem establishing that in a sufficiently large population of independent voters who are each slightly better than random at assessing a binary issue, the probability of the majority reaching the correct outcome approaches $1$ (or $100\%$).

Expressive Voting

The view that people vote out of a sense of civic duty and to express their personal voice, rather than with the expectation of casting a pivotal, outcome-determining ballot.

Median Voter Theorem

A political science theorem predicting that in a two-party system, both parties will converge toward the center preferences of the median voter to maximize vote share, a prediction contradicted by political polarization.

Explicit Logrolling

A legislative practice involving direct vote-swapping, where one politician votes for another's proposal benefiting their constituency in exchange for a reciprocal vote on a future bill.

Implicit Logrolling

The bundling of separate legislative proposals into a single bill or omnibus package through earmarks, such as combining farm subsidies for rural Republicans with welfare benefits for urban Democrats.

Pork-Barrel Politics

A political practice where representatives demand the inclusion of costly local public works projects benefiting their own constituency as a condition for voting in favor of a bill.

Condorcet Winner

The candidate or alternative that defeats every other candidate in head-to-head pairwise majority comparisons.

Condorcet Pairwise Majority Voting

A collective decision procedure that compares each pair of alternatives head-to-head to construct an overall social ranking, which can result in voting cycles where no clear winner exists.

Borda Count

A positional voting method that assigns points based on rank order, which fails to satisfy the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives because dropping an irrelevant candidate can alter the overall winner.

Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA)

A condition in voting theory requiring that the social ranking between two candidates depends solely on individual rankings of those two candidates, and cannot be altered by introducing or removing an irrelevant candidate.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

Kenneth Arrow's mathematical proof showing that no voting system can simultaneously satisfy Transitivity (no cycles), Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives, the Pareto principle, Unrestricted Domain, and Non-Dictatorship.

Cracking

A gerrymandering strategy of diluting opposing voters by distributing them thinly across multiple electoral districts to prevent them from securing a majority in any single district.

Packing

A gerrymandering strategy that concentrates the opposing party's voters into a small number of districts where they win by overwhelming margins, conceding those few seats to comfortably win the remaining districts.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act

A provision of federal civil rights law requiring map-drawers to design majority-minority districts to protect minority voting strength when redistricting.

Independent State Legislature Doctrine

A legal doctrine claiming that state legislatures possess exclusive constitutional power to determine congressional district maps, immune from intervention or review by state courts.

Veil of Ignorance

John Rawls's thought experiment in the Original Position where rational individuals select the fundamental principles of justice for society without knowing their social status, natural talents, or wealth.

Dworkin's Card-Game Analogy

An analogy illustrating the appeal of Rawls's Veil of Ignorance by asking players to agree upon fair rules for a card game before looking at the specific cards they were dealt.

Harsanyi's Impartial Observer

John Harsanyi's model where a decision-maker chooses social arrangements assuming an equal probability of occupying any person's position in society, maximizing expected utility and leading to utilitarianism.

Separateness of Persons

Rawls's philosophical critique of utilitarianism asserting that every person matters in their own right, meaning an individual's welfare cannot be sacrificed to produce aggregate welfare gains for others.

Difference Principle

Rawls's principle of justice permitting socioeconomic inequalities only to the extent that they maximize the position and well-being of the least-advantaged members of society by incentivizing productivity.

Rawls vs. Harsanyi Welfare Matrix

A comparative payoff distribution where Rawls selects Social Democracy to maximize the minimum payoff ($5$ for Person d), while Harsanyi selects Laissez Faire Capitalism to maximize expected aggregate utility ($\frac{100+10+0+20}{4} = 32.5$).