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4 - The View from Nowhere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2023

Adam Oliver
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary

Academics and policy makers in several countries have been advocating for measures of utility and happiness to replace income as indicators of development, and the paternalism that has dominated behavioural public policy to date is justified in that people often fail to choose in accordance with their own well-being. Yet the notion of utility has a somewhat confused history, meaning different things to different people at different times. Hume, for instance, aligned utility with public usefulness, Bentham with pleasure and pain, and Mill and modern welfare economists with pretty much anything. A possible reason why there are many different meanings attached to the concept of utility is because many people, much of the time, are not driven to maximise utility at all. That is, the pursuit of utility does not drive desires, but rather desires are antecedent. Moreover, desires are multifarious and vary across people. The policy maker’s role over the private realm of individual decision-making should not therefore be to strive to maximise utility, but rather to put in place conditions that facilitate people in the pursuit of their own conception of a desired life.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • The View from Nowhere
  • Adam Oliver, London School of Economics and Political Science
  • Book: A Political Economy of Behavioural Public Policy
  • Online publication: 16 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009282574.006
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  • The View from Nowhere
  • Adam Oliver, London School of Economics and Political Science
  • Book: A Political Economy of Behavioural Public Policy
  • Online publication: 16 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009282574.006
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The View from Nowhere
  • Adam Oliver, London School of Economics and Political Science
  • Book: A Political Economy of Behavioural Public Policy
  • Online publication: 16 February 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009282574.006
Available formats
×