BIRTH-DATE DEPENDENT POPULATION ETHICS - CRITICAL-LEVEL PRINCIPLES

This paper investigates birth-date dependent principles for social eva luation in an intertemporal framework in which population size may var y. WP weaken the strong Pareto principle in order to allow individuals ' birth dates to matter in establishing a social ordering. Using the a xiom independence of the utilities of the dead, we characterize popula tion principles with a recursive structure. If the individual substitu tion principle and an individual intertemporal equivalence axiom are a dded. birth-date dependent generalizations of the critical-level gener alized utilitarian principles result. Stationarity leads to the specia l case of geometric discounting. (C) 1997 Academic Press.