Foundations of utilitarianism under risk and variable population
Article dans une revue: Utilitarianism is the most prominent social welfare function in economics. We present three new axiomatic characterizations of utilitarian (that is, additively-separable) social welfare functions in a setting where there is risk over both population size and individuals' welfares. We first show that, given uncontroversial basic axioms, Blackorby et al.'s (1998) Expected Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarianism is equivalent to a new axiom holding that it is better to allocate higher utility-conditional-on-existence to possible people who have a higher probability of existence. The other two characterizations extend and clarify classic axiomatizations of utilitarianism from settings with either social risk or variable-population, considered alone.
Auteur(s)
Dean Spears, Stéphane Zuber
Revue
- Social Choice and Welfare
Date de publication
- 2022
Mots-clés JEL
Mots-clés
- Social risk
- Population ethics
- Utilitarianism
- Expected critical-level generalized utilitarianism
- Prioritarianism
URL de la notice HAL
Version
- 1