An intergenerational social welfare function that represents neutral-range utilitarianism

Stijn Bruers

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: An intergenerational social welfare function is presented for a population ethical theory that generalizes critical-level utilitarianism and necessitarianism. Utilities of future people are discounted when these utilities lie within a neutral range. This neutral-range utilitarianism mitigates the repugnant and sadistic conclusions in population ethics, but entails a time inconsistency: the ranking of options available to the social planner can change depending on when decisions are made. A modified social welfare function is proven to be top choice dynamically consistent. As applications, specific distributions of utilities of future people are used to derive closed form expressions of the Ramsey rule for the social discount rate and the maximum bandwidth of the neutral range.

Keywords: social welfare function; utilitarianism; time discounting; time inconsistency; population ethics; repugnant conclusion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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