utiliteettia

Utiliteettia is the Finnish term for utility, a central concept in economics and moral philosophy describing the level of satisfaction, usefulness, or welfare produced by a good, service, or action. In economic theory, utiliteettia is the criterion by which individuals are assumed to choose bundles under resource constraints to maximize their expected satisfaction. The concept is used to explain demand, choice, and welfare, and it underpins the idea that markets allocate resources efficiently when individuals act to maximize their utiliteettia.

Two strands have informed the idea: cardinal approaches, which imagine utility as measurable in numerical units (often referred to historically as "utils"), and ordinal approaches, which treat only the ranking of preferences as meaningful. In modern economics, ordinal utility is standard: researchers model preferences with utility functions that represent orderings rather than precise magnitudes.

In welfare economics and cost-benefit analysis, changes in policy are judged by their impact on total utiliteettia or on distributions of utiliteettia across individuals. Interpersonal comparisons of utiliteettia are controversial; many economists rely on concepts like Pareto efficiency or other criteria to avoid assuming comparable magnitudes of happiness.

In ethics, utiliteetti is tied to utilitarianism, where actions are evaluated by the sum or average of utiliteettia across sentient beings. The concept has faced criticisms for neglecting justice, rights, and non-welfarist values, and for difficulties in measurement and aggregation.

Within Finnish scholarship, utiliteettia appears in texts on consumer theory, welfare analysis, and policy evaluation, reflecting its dual role as a descriptive descriptor of preference and a normative gauge of welfare. See also: utility function, marginal utility, utilitarianism.