Population Ethics and the Value of Life

Public policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to assess the corresponding feasible choices on normative grounds, criteria for social evaluation that are capable of performing variable-population comparisons are required. We review several important axioms for welfarist population principles and discuss the link between individual well-being and the desirability of adding a new person to a given society.population ethics, neutrality, critical levels

MULTI-PROFILE WELFARISM : A GENERALISATION

This paper characterizes welfarist social evaluation in a multi-profile setting where, in addition to multiple utility profiles, there may be more than one profile of nonwelfare information. We prove a new version of the welfarism theorem in this alternative framework, and we demonstrate that adding a plausible and weak anonymity property to the welfarism axioms generates welfarist social-evaluation orderings that are anonymous. Journal of Economic LiteratureWelfarism ; Multiple-Profile Social Choice

ANONYMOUS SINGLE-PROFILE WELFARISM

This note reexamines the single-profile approach to social-choice theory. If an alternative is interpreted as a social state of affairs or a history of the world, it can be argued that a multi-profile approach is inappropriate because the information profile is determined by the set of alternatives. However, single-profile approaches are criticized because of the limitations they impose on the possibility of formulating properties such as anonymity. We suggest an alternative definition of anonymity that applies in a single-profile setting and characterize anonymous single-profile welfarism under a richness assumption.Welfarism ; Single-Profile Social Choice ; Anonymity

Population Principles with Number-Dependent Critical Levels

This paper introduces and characterizes the number-sensitive critical-level generalized utilitarian family of population principles which is a generalization of the critical-level generalized-utilitarian family. Number-sensitive critical-level utilitarian principles rank alternatives by using a value function that is equal to total utility minus a sum of critical levels that may depend on population size but not on individual utilities, and number-sensitive critical-level generalized-utilitarian principles use transformed utilities and critical levels. Ethical properties of the principles are investigated and the new family is compared to number-dampened generalized utilitarianism whose value functions are equal to transformed representative utility (average utility in the utilitarian case) multiplied by a function of population size.

Intertemporal Social Evaluation

Intertemporal social-evaluation rules provide us with social criteria that can be used to assess the relative desirability of utility distributions across generations. The trade-offs between the well-being of different generations implicit in each such rule reflect the underlying ethical position on issues of intergenerational equity or justice. We employ an axiomatic approach in order to identify ethically attractive socialevaluation procedures. In particular, we explore the possibilities of using welfare information and non-welfare information in a model of intertemporal social evaluation. We focus on the individuals’ birth dates and lengths of life as the relevant non-welfare information. As usual, welfare information is given by lifetime utilities. It is assumed that this information is available for each alternative to be ranked. Various weakenings of the Pareto principle are employed in order to allow birth dates or lengths of life (or both) to matter in social evaluation. In addition, we impose standard properties such as continuity and anonymity and we examine the consequences of an intertemporal independence property. For each of the Pareto conditions employed, we characterize all social-evaluation rules satisfying it and our other axioms. The resulting rules are birth-date dependent or lifetime-dependent versions of generalized utilitarianism. Furthermore, we discuss the ethical and axiomatic foundations of geometric discounting in the context of our model