Discounting future utilities is often justified by the ethically motivated objective to protect earlier generations from the excessive saving that seems to be implied by undiscounted utilitarianism in productive economies. In this paper we question this justification of discounting by showing that undiscounted utilitarianism has sufficient malleability within important classes of technologies: Any efficient and nondecreasing allocation can be the unique optimum according to an undiscounted utilitarian criterion for some choice of utility function.
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Asheim, G.B., Buchholz, W. (2007). The Malleability of Undiscounted Utilitarianism as a Criterion of Intergenerational Justice. In: Justifying, Characterizing and Indicating Sustainability. Sustainability, Economics, and Natural Resources, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6200-1_5
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