HBEs, like behavioral ecologists studying non-human animals, tend to use optimality modeling to determine which strategy would be maximally (if locally) fitness maximizing in the conditions under which it evolved.
A less egalitarian development of the suggestion would favor maximization of such opportunities rather than maximizing the opportunities available to those who enjoy the least of them.
Since it simplifies matters to apply the same rule of choice to all decisions this is a highly attractive idea, so long as one can accept that it is always safe to assume that that the maximization of expected utility leads over time to maximizing actual utility.
While Ange Postecoglou has taken over a poor international squad and Rodgers inherited a very talented club one (with all due respect, Luis Suárez is a slight step up from Josh Kennedy), the new Australian manager can learn much from the Reds boss when it comes to maximizing talent.
What you get instead is a kind of Mirror Universe version of the Chamber of Commerce, a politically powerful institution interested in maximizing the income growth of the median Swede rather than the median Swedish CEO.I think this is a plausible broad-strokes picture.
Since Mises considered all acting economic insofar as any consumer choice involved maximizing satisfaction in the widest sense, he opposed the narrow type of the homo economicus, modeled on the businessperson driven solely by economic motives at the expense of all others.
But, as Wolterstorff contends, there are many who do not satisfy Rawls' account of reasonability, including those who think of politics not in terms of distributive justice but other categories such as preserving individual liberty, protecting small government, maximizing their own wealth, and so on.
The usual rationale for maximizing expectation comes from the various laws of large numbers.
More illuminating is Hurka's view (1993 and Hurka 2007) that Nietzsche's evaluative posture conjoins perfectionism with maximizing consequentialism: what has value are certain human excellences (or perfections), and states of affairs are assessed in terms of their maximization of these excellences.
For example, perhaps the property of being "morally right" is just identical with the property of "maximizing human well-being," where the latter may be understood in purely psychological and physiological terms.
Why do many of us think that maximizing the good within a single life is perfectly acceptable, but maximizing the good across lives is wrong?
