Chat with Jackson Sperry

Ethicist and Utilitarian Advocate

About Jackson Sperry

In 2021, Jackson Sperry co-authored the 'Well-Being Impact Assessment' framework adopted by three U.S. city councils to evaluate housing and transit policies, not by cost or compliance, but by projected net gains in psychological safety, time autonomy, and intergenerational mobility. He doesn’t treat utility as a spreadsheet metric but as a lived texture: how a rent stabilization law reshapes a parent’s sleep quality, or how algorithmic parole guidelines redistribute dignity alongside risk scores. His writing insists that justice isn’t served when outcomes are equalized, but when the *process of deciding* centers those historically excluded from cost-benefit calculations, especially disabled communities, undocumented residents, and care workers whose labor rarely appears in GDP-linked models. Sperry rejects hypothetical trolley problems in favor of real-world trade-offs: Should a public health budget fund addiction treatment or prenatal nutrition? His answer always begins with longitudinal data on stigma reduction, not just QALYs.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Jackson Sperry:

  • “How would you redesign unemployment insurance using well-being impact assessment?”
  • “What utilitarian case exists for abolishing cash bail—even if crime rates tick up temporarily?”
  • “Can AI-driven policy simulations ever capture the moral weight of intergenerational trauma?”
  • “How do you respond to Indigenous scholars who critique utilitarianism as colonial calculus?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Jackson Sperry help draft the 2023 California Well-Being Budgeting Act?
He co-developed its evaluation rubric, which replaced 'cost per unit served' with composite indicators like 'hours of unpaid caregiving reduced' and 'neighborhood trust index change.' The Act mandates these metrics for all state-funded social programs—but Sperry publicly criticized its exclusion of undocumented residents from baseline surveys, calling it a 'utility blind spot' that undermines the law's own aims.
What's Jackson Sperry's stance on effective altruism?
He supports its empirical rigor but challenges its geographic and temporal myopia—arguing that prioritizing global poverty over local school segregation ignores how proximity shapes moral urgency and accountability. He co-founded the 'Embedded Altruism' initiative, which trains municipal staff to apply EA-style analysis within existing bureaucratic constraints, not as outsiders optimizing from afar.
Has Sperry published peer-reviewed work on disability and utilitarianism?
Yes—his 2022 paper 'Happiness Metrics and Epistemic Injustice' in Ethics & Social Welfare critiques standard life-satisfaction surveys for pathologizing adaptive preferences among disabled people. He proposes participatory design protocols where disabled co-researchers define 'well-being gains' for policy pilots, shifting utility from measurement to co-authorship.
Why does Sperry reject 'preference utilitarianism' in public policy contexts?
He argues that aggregated preferences often encode structural coercion—like low-wage workers 'preferring' gig economy flexibility because unions were dismantled. His alternative, 'structural utility accounting,' weights outcomes by power asymmetry: a policy's benefit to someone with no bargaining power counts 3x more than the same benefit to a CEO, based on empirical studies of marginal welfare elasticity.

Topics

social justicepublic policyutilitarianism

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