Sustainable Recursive Social Welfare Functions
Geir Asheim,
Tapan Mitra and
Bertil Tungodden
A chapter in The Economics of the Global Environment, 2016, pp 165-190 from Springer
Abstract:
Abstract What ethical criterion for intergenerational justice should be adopted, e.g., when faced with the task of managing the global environment? Koopmans ’ axiomatization of discounted utilitarianism is based on seemingly compelling conditions, yet this criterion leads to hard-to-justify outcomes. The present analysis considers a class of sustainable recursive social welfare functions within Koopmans ’ general framework. This class is axiomatized by means of a weak equity condition (“Hammond Equity for the Future”) and general existence is established. Any member of the class satisfies the key axioms of Chichilnisky’s ’s “sustainable preferences”. The analysis singles out one of Koopmans’ original separability conditions (his Postulate $$3'$$ a), here called “Independent Present”, as particularly questionable from an ethical perspective.
Keywords: Intergenerational justice; Sustainability; Discounted utilitarianism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D71 Q01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.
Related works:
Journal Article: Sustainable recursive social welfare functions (2012) 
Working Paper: Sustainable recursive social welfare functions (2006) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:steccp:978-3-319-31943-8_9
Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319319438
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-31943-8_9
Access Statistics for this chapter
More chapters in Studies in Economic Theory from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().