Welfare Judgments and Future Generations

Thomas Schwartz

A chapter in Game Theory, Social Choice and Ethics, 1979, pp 181-194 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The author argues that long-range welfare policies — policies designed to provide significant, widespread, continuing benefits to future generations, remote as well as near, at some cost to ourselves — cannot be justified by appeal to the welfare of remote future generations. He questions whether they can be justified at all. The problem is that the failure to adopt such a policy would not make any of our distant descendants worse off that he would otherwise be, since had the policy been adopted, he would not even have existed. These considerations also bring out a conflict between utilitarian and Paretian principles.

Keywords: Future Generation; Worth Living; Happy People; Aggregate Utility; Individual People (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1979
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DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9532-1_3

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