The value of limited altruism (Q1592823)

The authors study the problem whether moving the weights on the utilities of others closer to the weight on the agent's own well-being will result in actions that have better consequences in the sense that a better state of affairs results according to the impartial value function. Section 2 is concerned with the pure distribution problem: a fixed amount of a single resource is to be distributed to the people in the different groups. Section 3 considers the general choice problem: group one has an arbitrary set of feasible actions, each of which corresponds to a feasible utility vector. In section 4 the authors propose another way to describe objective functions for agents whose altruism is limited. Finally, Section 5 discusses a number of variations on the results obtained in the earlier sections.