Population ethics and the existence of value functions

This note provides a corrected version of a representation theorem in popul ation ethics. While it is true that the fixed-population axioms continuity and weak Pareto are sufficient for the existence of an ordering of populati on-size - representative-utility pairs that can be used to rank social alte rnatives, we show that, in order to obtain the existence of a real-valued r epresentation, continuity must be strengthened. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B .V. All rights reserved.