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In social choice and operations research, the egalitarian rule (also called the max-min rule or the Rawlsian rule) is a rule saying that, among all possible alternatives, society should pick the alternative which maximizes the minimum utility of all individuals in society.
The notion of social utility is analogous to the notion of a utility function in consumer choice. However, a social welfare function is different in that it is a mapping of individual utility functions onto a single output, in a way that accounts for the judgments of everyone in a society.
One extra unit of utility for a starving person is not seen to be of any greater value than an extra unit of utility for a millionaire. At the other extreme is the Max-Min, or Rawlsian utility function. [8] According to the Max-Min criterion, welfare is maximized when the utility of those society members that have the least is the greatest.
A Theory of Justice is a 1971 work of political philosophy and ethics by the philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) in which the author attempts to provide a moral theory alternative to utilitarianism and that addresses the problem of distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society).
A visual depiction of philosopher John Rawls's hypothetical veil of ignorance. Citizens making choices about their society are asked to make them from an "original position" of equality (left) behind a "veil of ignorance" (wall, center), without knowing what gender, race, abilities, tastes, wealth, or position in society they will have (right).
Social choice theory is the study of theoretical and practical methods to aggregate or combine individual preferences into a collective social welfare function. The field generally assumes that individuals have preferences, and it follows that they can be modeled using utility functions, by the VNM theorem.
John Bordley Rawls (/ r ɔː l z /; [2] February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. [3] [4] Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.
The utility functions may represent their chance of recovery – () is the probability of agent to recover by getting doses of the medication. The utilitarian rule then allocates the medication in a way that maximizes the expected number of survivors.