Public policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to assess the corresponding feasible choices on...

This note reexamines the single-profile approach to social-choice theory. If an alternative is interpreted as a social state of affairs or a history of the world, it can be argued that a multi-profile approach is inappropriate because the information profile is determined by the set of...

This paper reviews the welfarist approach to population ethics. We provide an overview of the critical-level utilitarian population principles and their generalized counterparts, examine important properties of these principles and discuss their relationships to other variable-population...

Intertemporal social-evaluation rules provide us with social criteria that can be used to assess the relative desirability of utility distributions across generations. The trade-offs between the well-being of different generations implicit in each such rule reflect the underlying ethical...

Critical-level generalized-utilitarian population principles with positive critical levels provide an ethically attractive way of avoiding the repugnant conclusion. We discuss the axiomatic foundations of critical-level generalized utilitarianism and investigate its relationship to the sadistic...

This paper provides new versions of Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem that are formulated in terms of prospects rather than lotteries. Strengthening an earlier result, fixed-population ex-ante utilitarianism is characterized in a multi-profile setting with fixed probabilities. In addition,...

This paper examines several families of population principles in the light of a set of axioms. In addition to the critical level utilitarian, number-sensitive critical-level utilitarian and number-dampened families and their generalized counterparts, we consider the restricted number-dampened...

This paper prouves a new representation theorem for domains with both discrete and continuous variables.

Kin selection theorists argue that evolution in social contexts will lead organisms to behave as if maximizing their inclusive, as opposed to personal, fitness. The inclusive fitness concept allows biologists to treat organisms as akin to rational agents seeking to maximize a utility function....

In order to analyze a unicellular-multicellular evolutionary transition, a multicellular organism is identified with the vector of viabilities and fecundities of its constituent cells. The Michod–Viossat–Solari–Hurand–Nedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism is a...