IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-94-009-9532-1_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Welfare Judgments and Future Generations

In: Game Theory, Social Choice and Ethics

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas Schwartz

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Schwartz, 1979. "Welfare Judgments and Future Generations," Springer Books, in: H. W. Brock (ed.), Game Theory, Social Choice and Ethics, pages 181-194, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-94-009-9532-1_3
    DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9532-1_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-94-009-9532-1_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.