2025/08/04 by Daniel Muñoz · 2 voices
Social Sciences · #Intellectual Property Law
paper · doi:10.16995/fe.18681
openalex publication_date 2025/08/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In the last 30 years, several influential arguments have pushed ethics in a utilitarian direction by invoking the principle of Outcome Anonymity, which holds that two outcomes are equally good if they involve the same distribution of welfare, differing only in who is at which level. This principle is often presented as a minimal requirement of impartiality. I argue that it is not. Outcome Anonymity forbids something more than being partial: it forbids caring who is who in a welfare distribution. Using this concept of “caring who,” I push back on the above arguments and contend that it is not Outcome Anonymity but a weaker principle, known as “Anonymity,” that is the essence of impartial concern.