Advances in technology have made it possible for us to take actions that affect the numbers
and identities of humans and other animals that will live in the future. Effective and
inexpensive birth control, child allowances, genetic screening, safe abortion, in vitro ...

This paper considers the problem of social evaluation in a model where population size,
individual lifetime utilities, lengths of life, and birth dates vary across states. In an
intertemporal framework, we investigate principles for social evaluation that allow history ...

... 129–151. 5; C. Blackorby, W. Bossert, D. Donaldson, Intertemporally consistent population ethics:
Classical utilitarian principles, Social Choice Re-Examined, MacMillan, London; ... Bossert, D.
Donaldson, Critical-level utilitarianism and the population-ethics dilemma, Econ. Philos. ...

... of critical-level utilitarian rules are unacceptable because they recommend the killing of some
people with positive utility levels. In particular, Cowen claims that average util- itarianism
recommends killing anyone whose utility is below average and that critical-level utilitarianism ...

Abstract We characterize optimal consumption, capital, and population growth of a
production economy under critical-level utilitarianism. First, we show that neither classical
utilitarianism nor average utilitarianism can avoid a corner solution for the population ...

... It is used to provide a new characterization of critical-level generalized utilitarian population princi-
ples in the certainty case. Critical-level generalized utilitarianism compares two states of the world
on the basis of the sum of the differences between transformed utilities and a ...

Abstract This paper uses a formal analysis of the relation of 'parity'to make sense of a well-
known solution to Parfit's 'mere addition paradox'. This solution is sometimes dismissed as a
recourse to 'incomparability'. In this analysis, however, the solution is consistent with ...

While Dalton (1920) was the first to ground the measurement of income inequality on social
welfare considerations, it was not until the pioneering articles of Kolm (1969), Atkinson
(1970), Dasgupta, Sen, and Starrett (1973), and Rothschild and Stiglitz (1973) in the late ...

... For utilitarianism is better able to secure them this status than are intuitionist theories. ... The use
of this method at the critical level to select principles for general use does not in ... selected and
inculcated, against too facile appeals to immediate utility; it is sound utilitarian wisdom to ...

... Hare distinguishes between "level-l" thinking at an immediate intuitive level and "level-2" thinking
at a more critical level. ... The commonest trick of the opponents of utilitarianism is to take examples
of such [level-2] thinking, usually ... It makes the utilitarian look like a moral monster. ...