ABSTRACT
Total Utilitarianism is the view that an action is right if and only if it maximizes the sum total of people’s well-being. In Feldman’s presentation of Justicism, he oscillates between two different ways of taking desert into account: the merit-idea and the fit-idea. This chapter focuses on a combination of the fit-idea with a value function according to which the intrinsic value of a life is determined by the sum of the value of pleasure and the value of the fit between pleasure and the recipient’s desert, that is, an additively separable value function. It introduces a formalism in which we can state this value function and the fit-idea in an exact manner. This will make the structure and the implications of the theory take a clearer form as compared to previous formulations. The combination of these two principles and the value function forms a theory—Additively Separable Fit Justicism.
