Abstract:
An intergenerational social welfare function is presented for a population ethical theory that generalizes critical-level utilitarianism and necessitarianism. Utilities of future people are discounted when these utilities lie within a neutral range. This neutral-range utilitarianism mitigates the repugnant and sadistic conclusions in population ethics, but entails a time inconsistency: the ranking of options available to the social planner can change depending on when decisions are made. A modified social welfare function is proven to be top choice dynamically consistent. As applications, specific distributions of utilities of future people are used to derive closed form expressions of the Ramsey rule for the social discount rate and the maximum bandwidth of the neutral range.
