McCarthy, D., Measuring life’s goodness. Philosophical Books 48(4) (2007):303–19.
PDF
| Abstract
One major strand of ethical theorizing proceeds by supposing that there exist what I will call individual goodness measures. These are functions from lotteries over entire world histories to the real numbers which somehow purport to measure how good such lotteries are for individuals. Utilitarianism plainly presupposes that such measures exist when it says that one lottery is better than another just in case it contains a greater sum of individual goodness. And so do various well known ways of departing from utilitarianism.
