Formal Welfarism and Intergenerational Equity

Claude d’Aspremont

Chapter 8 in Intergenerational Equity and Sustainability, 2007, pp 113-130 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Intergenerational justice is a matter that should primarily concern the present generation, since the individuals living now are those to take immediate decisions affecting generations that will be living in the future, and even in the far future, as we know, for example, from the exhaustibility of some resources or from the long-term effects of pollution such as global warming. Of course, each future generation will become ‘present’ at some point in time, and the reasoning followed for the present ‘present generation’ about intergenerational justice could be repeated at that point in time. But, to develop this reasoning, each present generation should have a representation of future generations’ interests. In that respect, a simple formulation of the problem that has been extensively analyzed consists in trying to find, under equity and efficiency conditions, an ordering of the set of possible ‘infinite utility streams’, that is, of the set of possible infinite sequences of utility levels attached to the successive generations starting with the present generation. In such a formulation, the welfare of each generation is represented by a single utility level, as if a generation were composed of a single individual or of a cohort of identical individuals with identical allocation.

Keywords: Social Welfare; Social Choice; Present Generation; Strict Preference; Social Choice Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:intecp:978-0-230-23676-9_8

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230236769_8

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