Theory Calculator

Theories that give equal consideration to everyone affected can still disagree about which situation is better, because they look at different aspects: the sum, the average, who is worst off, inequality, how many have enough. Set up the situations and see what each one chooses.

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Each number is one individual’s level of well-being (positive: their life is going well; negative: it is going badly). Leave a cell empty if that individual does not exist in that situation.

The table follows the aspects in Volume XI, chapter 3, and the examples in the author’s article “Comparando várias teorias da ética normativa” (in Portuguese). Desert, types of actions and types of relationships also appear in the chapter, but they cannot be reduced to numbers, so they are left out. For prioritarianism and sufficientarianism, the tool uses an illustrative formula chosen by this site (the book does not fix one): the value of each well-being level w is (1 − e^−k·w)/k, which makes each point worth more the worse off the person receiving it is. Pluralist theories combine several of these aspects with different weights; that debate is in chapter 7, “Weighing Criteria”.