The Welfare Economics of Population

John Broome

Oxford Economic Papers, 1996, vol. 48, issue 2, 177-93

Abstract: Intuition suggests there is no value in adding people to the population if it brings no benefits to people already living: creating people is morally neutral in itself. This paper examines the difficulties of incorporating this intuition into a coherent theory of the value of population. It takes three existing theories within welfare economics--average utilitarianism, relativist utilitarianism, and critical-level utilitarianism--and considers whether they can satisfactorily accommodate the intuition that creating people is neutral. Copyright 1996 by Royal Economic Society.

Date: 1996
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