This note investigates the extension of Roberts' price-independent welfare prescriptions toalternatives in which population size and composition can vary. We show that ethicallyunsatisfactory orderings result. Suppose that a single person is to be added to a populationthat is unaected in utility...

In pure population problems, a single resource is to be distributed equally among theagents in a society, and the social planner chooses population size(s) and per-capita consumption(s) for each resource constraint and set of feasible population sizes within thedomain of the solution...

This paper reviews the welfarist approach to population ethics. We provide an overview of the critical-level utilitarian population principles and their generalized counterparts, examine important properties of these principles and discuss their relationships to other variable-population...

Intertemporal social-evaluation rules provide us with social criteria that can be used to assess the relative desirability of utility distributions across generations. The trade-offs between the well-being of different generations implicit in each such rule reflect the underlying ethical...

L'article examine les conditions qui permettent de satisfaire simultanément les versions ex ante et ex post du principe de Pareto, lorsqu'on cesse d'imposer l'hypothèse de l'utilité espérée aux préférences individuelles et sociales. Avec des probabilités subjectives qui peuvent varier,...

Many decisions regarding the choice of public policies affect the size and composition of the population. In order to choose rationally in those situations, therefore, normative criteria must be capable of comparing states of affairs with different populations. This paper introduces a new class...