ABSTRACT
The single most important criterion to judge if a policy is successful is whether or not it brings net benefits to the community. But this begs the question of what constitutes a benefit and what constitutes a cost. There are generally conflicting goals, and in order to assess if a policy ultimately benefits society all of the effects have to be considered, and more specifically, all of the effects on all people have to be considered. Following our earlier discussion on the representative individual, we propose that we have to consider the impact of the proposed policy on everyone in the society, while forgetting our own personal identity and our own personal interests. This approach is very useful, even though it may still be criticized as imprecise. While we would accept that the proposed approach is imprecise, we would argue that it nevertheless goes a long way toward fairly considering many of our key issues, and that it is consistent with an important concept of justice.
