Does the Utilitarian Strategy Treat Persons Equally?
Having given general, Bayesian/utilitarian justifications for his position, Harsanyi provides a final argument that is non-Bayesian. This non-Bayesian defense focuses on what Harsanyi calls “the equiprobability assumption.”47 Decisionmakers ought to subscribe to this assumption, says Harsanyi, because doing so enables them to treat all individuals’ a priori interests as equal.48 That is, regardless of the social system chosen, one “would have the same probability, 1/n, of taking the place of the best-off individual, or the second-best-off individual, etc., up to the worst-off individual.” If everyone has an equal chance of being better off or worse off, Harsanyi claims that the rational person would always make the risk decision yielding the highest “average utility level.”49Although some scholars have alleged that Bayes makes use of the equiprobability assumption, most experts claim that his argument is free of this assumption.50 Bayesian or not, the assumption is central to Harsanyi’
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