How should we make value judgments about wealth inequality? Harsanyi (1953) proposes to take an individual who evaluates her well-being by expected utility and ask her to evaluate the wealth possibilities ex-ante (i.e. before she finds her place in society, i.e., under the "veil of ignorance" of...

This paper carries out a brief analysis of Amartya Sen’s thinking on Justice, based on Part IV of his book The Idea of Justice. Besides of describing Sen’s thoughts on the subject, the paper aims to contextualize it in the evolution of Sen’s work and in the general discussion on Justice in...

We present a new version of the overtaking criterion, which we call generalized time-invariant overtaking. The generalized time-invariant overtaking criterion (on the space of infinite utility streams) is defined by extending proliferating sequences of complete and transitive binary relations...

This paper studies a class of social welfare relations (SWRs) on the set of infinite utility streams. In particular, we examine the SWRs satisfying Q-Anonymity, an impartiality axiom stronger than Finite Anonymity, as well as Strong Pareto and a certain equity axiom. First, we characterize the...

We develop and formalize a utilitarian notion of responsibility for sustainability which is inspired by Singer's (1972) principle and the Brundtland Commission?s notion of sustainability (WCED 1987). We relate this notion of responsibility to established criteria for the assessment of...

We show that it is possible to reconcile the utilitarian and welfarist principles under the\r\nrequirement of unanimity provided that the set of profiles over which the consensus is\r\nattained is rich enough. More precisely, we identify a closedness condition which, if satisfied\r\nby a class...

We provide foundations for robust normative evaluation of distributions of two attributes,\r\none of which is cardinally measurable and transferable between individuals and the other is\r\nordinal and non-transferable. The result that we establish takes the form of an analogue to the standard...