Abstract There is an ongoing debate on whether offenders’ private benefits must be counted as part of social welfare. It has been argued on utilitarian grounds that their utility must be included, but it has also been argued on explicit or implicit deontological grounds that their utility should not be counted at all. In this paper, we reconsider this debate from the perspective of the principal-agent relationship between a utilitarian government and law enforcers in the law enforcement process. Our results show that a utilitarian government that weighs every society member’s utility equally should direct its law enforcers to maximize an objective function that discounts criminals’ gains.
Cato et al. (Thu,) studied this question.