Consequentialism and Distributive Justice

Classical utilitarianism aggregates welfare across all affected persons, summing (or, on some versions, averaging) individual utilities into a single overall figure, and evaluates competing policies or actions solely by the resulting aggregate, without any independent constraint on how that welfare happens to be distributed among the individuals who make it up. On a purely aggregative calculation, a policy producing a very large total of welfare concentrated in relatively few people can outrank an alternative that distributes a somewhat smaller total more evenly across the whole population, a feature of utilitarian reasoning that has drawn sustained philosophical criticism from theorists concerned with justice and fairness in distribution.