Evaluating intergenerational risks

Geir Asheim and Stéphane Zuber

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: Climate policies have stochastic consequences that involve a great number of generations. This calls for evaluating social risk (what kind of societies will future people be born into) rather than individual risk (what will happen to people during their own lifetimes). We respond to this call by proposing and axiomatizing probability adjusted rank-discounted critical-level generalized utilitarianism (PARDCLU) through a key axiom ensuring that the social welfare order both is ethical and satisfies first-order stochastic dominance. PARDCLU yields a new useful perspective on intergenerational risks, is ethical in contrast to discounted utilitarianism, and avoids objections that have been raised against other ethical criteria. We show that PARDCLU handles situations with positive probability of human extinction and is linked to decision theory by yielding rank-dependent expected utilitarianism — but with additional structure — in a special case

Keywords: Social evaluation; population ethics; decision-making under risk; critical-level utilitarianism; social discounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D71 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

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ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2016/16011.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Evaluating intergenerational risks (2016)
Working Paper: Evaluating intergenerational risks (2016)
Working Paper: Evaluating intergenerational risks (2016)
Working Paper: Evaluating intergenerational risks (2016)
Working Paper: Evaluating intergenerational risks (2016)
Working Paper: Evaluating intergenerational risks (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mse:cesdoc:16011

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