The Veil of Ignorance argument, the idea of evaluating a society by how attractive it would be to be randomly placed in it, is usually credited to John Rawls but was proposed by John Harsanyi almost twenty years earlier. 'Randomly placed' implies an equal probability of being anyone in the society's population. Defining cardinal utility along the lines proposed by Von Neuman, the utility of a lottery is the expected value of the outcomes, the sum of probability of outcome times utility of outcome, so the utility of an equal probability of living any life in the society is the average utility of the society. Hence, Harsanyi argued,1 the best society is the one with the highest average utility, a view often taken for granted by authors comparing the futures implied by alternative public policies.2 Suppose two communities A and B to exist. Suppose that neither has any appreciable economic dependence on the other so that the disappearance of A would not appreciably affect the standard...
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