NE&EP webinar on Monday 30th: Maya Eden on Person-Affecting Population Ethics
may...@gmail.com
Dear all,
Our next NE&EP webinar will take place on Monday March 30th at 5pm (Paris time).
The speaker is Maya Eden (University of Zurich). Maya will present:
Person-Affecting Population Ethics: Guidelines for Macroeconomic Policy (abstract below)
You can join the webinar with the following link: https://uio.zoom.us/j/62568004122
We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Maya Eden and Paolo Piacquadio
Title: “Person-Affecting Population Ethics: Guidelines for Macroeconomic Policy”
Abstract: How should policymakers make decisions that affect the population trajectory? I study the implications of the person-affecting approach to population ethics, according to which we ought to be “neutral” about making happy people (Narveson [1976]). I formalize this approach as a decision rule that is based on the following premises: (a) two alternatives that imply very different populations are incomparable, and (b) two alternatives with sufficiently similar populations are comparable on the bases of the sum of utilities of those individuals who exist in both. I show that, if small changes in policy result in small changes in the identities of future people, then this approach characterizes a solution to a fixed-point problem, in which the optimal policy maximizes the population-weighted sum of per-capita utilities in each period.