Utilitarianism is the most prominent family of social welfare functions. We present three new axiomatic ….'s (1998) Expected Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarianism (ECLGU) is equivalent to a new axiom holding that it is better to … novel characterizations extend classic axiomatizations of utilitarianism from settings with either social risk or variable …

-level generalized utilitarianism (PARDCLU), through a key axiom that requires that the social welfare order both be ethical and satisfy … discounted utilitarianism, and avoids objections that have been raised against other ethical criteria. PARDCLU is shown to handle … situations with positive probability of human extinction, and is linked to decision theory by yielding rank-dependent expected …

Expected Utility theory is not only applied to individual choices but also to ethical decisions, e.g. in cost … EU theory is able to deal with "catastrophic risks", i.e. risks of high, but very unlikely losses, in an ethically … appealing way. In this paper we show that this is not the case. Rather, if in the framework of EU theory a plausible level of …