Impartial utilitarianism on infinite utility streams

Abstract

When evaluating policies that affect future generations, the most commonly used criterion is the discounted utilitarian rule. However, in terms of intergenerational fairness, it is difficult to justify prioritizing the current generation over future generations. This paper axiomatically examines impartial utilitarian rules over infinite-dimensional utility streams. We provide simple characterizations of the social welfare ordering evaluating utility streams by their long-run average in the domain where the average can be defined. Furthermore, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions of the same axioms in a more general domain, the set of bounded streams. Some of these results are closely related to the Banach limits, a well-known generalization of the classical limit concept for streams. Thus, this paper can be seen as proposing an appealing subclass of the Banach limits by the axiomatic analysis.