Well-being Of Future Generations Research Articles

Cooperating with the future.

Overexploitation of renewable resources today has a high cost on the welfare of future generations. Unlike in other public goods games, however, future generations cannot reciprocate actions made today. What mechanisms can maintain cooperation with the future? To answer this question, we devise a new experimental paradigm, the 'Intergenerational Goods Game'. A line-up of successive groups (generations) can each either extract a resource to exhaustion or leave something for the next group. Exhausting the resource maximizes the payoff for the present generation, but leaves all future generations empty-handed. Here we show that the resource is almost always destroyed if extraction decisions are made individually. This failure to cooperate with the future is driven primarily by a minority of individuals who extract far more than what is sustainable. In contrast, when extractions are democratically decided by vote, the resource is consistently sustained. Voting is effective for two reasons. First, it allows a majority of cooperators to restrain defectors. Second, it reassures conditional cooperators that their efforts are not futile. Voting, however, only promotes sustainability if it is binding for all involved. Our results have implications for policy interventions designed to sustain intergenerational public goods.

Taking the Well-Being of Future Generations Seriously: Do People Contribute More to Intra-Temporal or Inter-Temporal Public Goods?

We investigate the dynamics of cooperation in public good games when contributions to the public good are immediately redistributed across contributors (intra-temporal transfers) and when contributions to the public good by the current group are transferred over time to a future group (inter-temporal transfers). We show that people are more cooperative in inter-temporal contexts than in intra-temporal contexts. We also find that subjects invest more on average in public goods when they know in advance their inheritance from the past.

The Ethics of Payment for Ecosystem Services

The Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an economic tool that has emerged in recent years as a mechanism to promote conservation of natural resources, as well as that of various goods and services commonly used. However, its application in practice raises a number of ethical concerns that this study seeks to discuss. The concept and benefits of PES are discussed, emphasizing its neoclassical economic nature background and how the initial anthropogenic position has evolved into a more holistic ecosystem vision. The paper examines some of the relationships between ethics and ecosystem services as well as the natural conflicts emerging from the opposition of utilitarian economic values versus moral arguments and deontological ethical systems. Then, a justification for ethics in payment for ecosystem services is provided as an attempt to solve perceived conflicts between conservation and human welfare. Later, the right to benefit from natural resources and PES is discussed. The conflict between natural resources as public goods whose use is a universal right for all human beings and the property rights, either legal or ancestral, of indigenous and originary people is stressed. Finally, the future of ethics and ecosystem services on issues such as the well-being of future generations and the search of an efficient integration based on land planning and conservation management strategies is discussed. In conclusion, the paper emphasizes the need for a better, integrated accounting of the benefits and costs of nature conservation, which will probably only occur when teams of natural and social scientists work together.

Sustaining Welfare for Future Generations: A Review Note on the Capital Approach to the Measurement of Sustainable Development

Measuring sustainable development based on analytical models of growth and development and modern methods of growth accounting is an economic approach—often called the capital approach – to establishing sustainable development indicators (SDIs). Ecological approaches may be combined with the capital approach, but there are also other approaches to establishing sustainable development indicators—for example the so-called integrated approach. A recent survey of the various approaches is provided in UNECE, OECD and Eurostat [1]. This review note is not intended to be another survey of the various approaches. Rather the objective of this paper is twofold: to present an update on an economic approach to measuring sustainable development—the capital approach—and how this approach may be combined with the ecological approach; to show how this approach is actually used as a basis for longer-term policies to enhance sustainable development in Norway—a country that relies heavily on non-renewable natural resources. We give a brief review of recent literature and set out a model of development based on produced, human, natural and social capital, and the level of technology. Natural capital is divided into two parts—natural capital produced and sold in markets (oil and gas)—and non-market natural capital such as clean air and biodiversity. Weak sustainable development is defined as non-declining welfare per capita if the total stock of a nation's capital is maintained. Strong sustainable development is if none of the capital stocks, notably non-market natural capital, is reduced below critical or irreversible levels. Within such a framework, and based on Norwegian experience and statistical work, monetary indexes of national wealth and its individual components including real capital, human capital and market natural capital are presented. Limits to this framework and to these calculations are then discussed, and we argue that such monetary indexes should be sustainable development indicators (SDIs) of non-market natural capital, and physical SDIs, health capital and social capital. Thus we agree with the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission [2] that monetary indexes of capital should be combined with physical SDIs of capital that have no market prices. We then illustrate the policy relevance of this framework, and how it is actually being used in long term policy making in Norway—a country that relies heavily on non-renewable resources like oil and gas. A key sustainability rule for Norwegian policies is to maintain the total future capital stocks per capita in real terms as the country draws down its stocks of non-renewable natural capital —applying a fiscal guideline akin to the Hartwick rule.

Environmental Impact Assessments from a Business Perspective: Extending Knowledge and Guiding Business Practice

Economic growth and development remain embedded in the very core of our current international economic system and the so called “material economy”. However, depleting natural resources and environmental degradation, which now threaten the well-being of future generations, has challenged this premise, and placed sustainable development as a necessary objective of business activity and expansion. Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) have emerged as a key tool for governments, businesses, and NGOs to manage the negative impact of their activities on the environment. Businesses in particular play a key role in averting or mitigating current environmental trends given that the economic growth they have stimulated has serious consequences for both the environment and social well-being. However, research on the use of EIAs has been conducted mostly from a governmental perspective producing a clear gap between research development and business (corporate) practice. To bridge this gap in knowledge, we develop a new EIA process tailored to real world business constraints and provide a range of propositions which we hope will stimulate future research efforts toward understanding and guiding how businesses integrate environmental issues into their decision-making processes.

The tobacco-free generation proposal

The tobacco-free generation proposal advocates legislation precluding the sale and supply of tobacco to individuals born after a certain year. The measure is aimed at overcoming defects with current youth...

Modeling international climate change negotiations more responsibly: Can highly simplified game theory models provide reliable policy insights?

In a recent article in this journal entitled “Game Theory and Climate Diplomacy”, DeCanio and Fremstad (2013) provide an interesting treatment of a range of simple game theoretic characterizations of international climate negotiations. The authors use the Nash and Maxi-min stability definitions to analyze 25 two-by-two ordinal games, which they recognize as “possible game-theoretic characterizations of climate negotiations between two players (e.g., Great Powers or coalitions of states)”. The authors' main conclusion that the Prisoner's Dilemma might not be the best description of climate negotiations game is consistent with the findings of others who have studied two-by-two conflicts over natural commons (Bardhan, 1993; Madani, 2010; Sandler, 1992; Taylor, 1987). Nevertheless, given the importance of the climate change issue, as well as the potential effects of our actions on the state of the environment and the well-being of future generations, I would like to address some gaps in their analysis, which result in it having limited usefulness for policy purposes. Of course, all models are simplified representations of reality, full of limitations. “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful” (Box and Draper, 1987). So, “the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful” (Box and Draper, 1987). Models' limitations need to be carefully considered when interpreting them or applying their results to policy but some models are too simple to provide useful policy advice.

Assortative Mating

Psychosocial programs that introduce young people with psychosis to each other encourage bonding and, perhaps, marriage. By providing such programs, are we unwittingly promoting assortative mating, with ill effects for offspring? Or, on the other hand, are we ensuring better health for young people with psychosis and perhaps laying the groundwork for stronger marital unions than they would otherwise have formed? Instead of steering young people with psychosis into specialized services, should we be "mainstreaming" them, equipping them in situ with the skills necessary to navigate the larger social world? Should we even be considering the welfare of future generations, or is this beyond psychiatry's ken?

The Limits of Sustainability and Opportunities in the Social Economy

Ten years after 9/11, we as a nation have had to address issues of sustainability that other generations of Americans have not faced in quite the same way. Considerable attention, and understandably so, has focused on the security of our borders and threats to our homeland. Environmental disasters have tested our maturity as well, and this entire editorial could be devoted to that topic alone. But here we focus on economic and social sustainability, because the two closely intertwine, and the path we are on is not sustainable from either point of view. We begin with economic sustainability, because that probably weighs most heavily on the minds of Americans at this time, and end with potential opportunities in the social economy. ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY When Standard & Poor's lowered the U.S. credit rating in August 2011, a deep and profound shudder ran through the hold of our ship. However much we might want to blame political deadlock for the downgrade--and there is plenty of blame to go around--the reality remains that we can no longer sustain the fiscal path we are on. The federal budget deficit--the difference between actual revenues and budgeted spending-is currently about $1.5 trillion. This is roughly equivalent to 10 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), the market value of all goods and services produced in the United States. Four years ago, the federal budget deficit was about 3 percent of GDP. Economic recession and war operations aside, the federal government has been running budget deficits every year since 1970 except four, and the additive effect on the national debt is alarming. The national debt--the cumulative amount the federal spending in excess of revenues--now stands at about $14 trillion. Approximately 70 percent of GDP, the rate is much higher now than historical averages around 40 percent, a reflection of the deep recession and recent tax policy decisions. More than half of the national debt is in the form of debt securities sold to private investors, mostly from other countries, unlike public debt in the past. Fortunately, current interest rates on the securities are very low. When rates return to historical averages, the national debt will grow exponentially, putting future taxpayers at great risk, not only in having to pay off the debt, but also in owing payments to investors who may not have U.S. interests at heart. Clearly, this is not sustainable; for if sustainability means anything, it means creating preconditions to ensure the economic well-being of future generations. From a fiscal perspective, we have a revenue problem and a spending problem. The Office of Management and Budget (2012) reports that during fiscal year (FY) 2010, the last completed FY, the federal government collected $2.16 trillion in tax revenue. Forty percent ($865 billion) came from employment taxes for social security and social insurance, 42 percent ($899 billion) from individual income taxes, 9 percent ($191 billion) from corporate income taxes, and the balance ($207 billion) from excise and other taxes. Yet total federal revenues for the FY, relative to GDP, were the lowest in half a century--a mere 14.9 percent. What contributed to the historic drop in federal tax revenues? Dramatic falloffs in individual and corporate income tax revenues from the recession clearly had the greatest impact. The Bush tax cuts, coupled with other tax policy decisions, had a substantial impact as well, with arguably little payoff for the economy (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2011). A subtle but powerful factor was also at work. The U.S. tax burden was substantially lower than that of other major countries, and it has been for quite some time (Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, 2010). Having noted that, we must quickly cite the nation's daunting spending problem as well. The Office of Management and Budget (2011) reported that the federal government spent $3. …

Harm to Future Persons: Non-Identity Problems and Counterpart Solutions

Non-Identity arguments have a pervasive but sometimes counter-intuitive grip on certain key areas in ethics. As a result, there has been limited success in supporting the alternative view that our choices concerning future generations can be considered harmful on any sort of person-affecting principle. However, as the Non-Identity Problem relies overtly on certain metaphysical assumptions, plausible alternatives to these foundations can substantially undermine the Non-Identity argument itself. In this paper, I show how the pervasive force and nature of Non-Identity arguments rely upon a specific adoption of a theory of modality and identity and how adopting an alternative account of modality can be used to reject many conclusions formed through Non-Identity type arguments. By using Lewis’s counterpart-theoretic account to understand ways we might have been, I outline the basis of a modal account of harm that incorporates a person-affecting aspect. This, in turn, has significant implications for ethical decision-making in areas such as reproductive choice and the welfare of future generations.

What is Sustainability?

Sustainability as a policy concept has its origin in the Brundtland Report of 1987. That document was concerned with the tension between the aspirations of mankind towards a better life on the one hand and the limitations imposed by nature on the other hand. In the course of time, the concept has been re-interpreted as encompassing three dimensions, namely social, economic and environmental. The paper argues that this change in meaning (a) obscures the real contradiction between the aims of welfare for all and environmental conservation; (b) risks diminishing the importance of the environmental dimension; and (c) separates social from economic aspects, which in reality are one and the same. It is proposed instead to return to the original meaning, where sustainability is concerned with the well-being of future generations and in particular with irreplaceable natural resources—as opposed to the gratification of present needs which we call well-being. A balance needs to be found between those two, but not by pretending they are three sides of the same coin. Although we use up natural resources at the expense of future generations, we also generate capital (including knowledge) which raises future well-being. A major question is to what extent the one compensates for the other. This debate centres around the problem of substitutability, which has been cast into a distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ sustainability. It is argued that these two do not need to be in opposition but complement one another.

The Times Should Be A-Changin’

As we begin the New Year, we look forward to some difficult times ahead. The excesses of unbridled capitalism, primarily manifested in Wall Street greed and high-stakes gambling in the housing industry, threaten the traditions and institutions of future generations. Although we should be poised to pursue the dreams and aspirations of increasingly well-prepared children, we face dismal prospects of ongoing recession and looming budget cuts in government. Budget cuts proposed by privileged men in high offices threaten the well-being of vulnerable children, women, and minority groups. Bailed out industries continue to profit and distribute obscene bonuses to those responsible for catastrophic decisions. Stakeholders were left with empty promises. In the aftermath, some are trying to balance the budget on the backs of children. The atrocities of the 9/11 disaster threatened our collective well-being and confronted our beliefs in a just world. Other nations embraced America and prepared to support us through difficult times of recovery. Unfortunately, men of privilege and greed seized on the disaster to promote a culture of fear. Fostering an illusion of imminent demise justified another generation of warfare with dead children in foreign lands and disabled veterans trying to find their way home. Next came the assaults on human rights and civil liberties. America narrowly avoided the loss of essential identity, which is simply expressed in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in the rush to protect us from real and imagined enemies. We eventually traded international good will for enmity and suspicion. American leaders protected our future by violating the basic traditions and boundaries that define us as a people. The governor of the state of Mississippi, like the privileged executives in some other states, is seizing opportunities afforded by financial fears to restructure public services. Nationally, the American people invested billions to protect merchants of greed at the cost of health, education, and welfare for future generations. The Mississippi governor would like to balance the budget by consolidating historically Black universities, eliminating traditions and identities shared by those who struggled for civil rights and their families. He would eliminate the unique identity of Mississippi University for Women by making it a branch of Mississippi State University. Critics of consolidation argue that there would be little or no financial benefit. If there were savings, they will not be realized until 2012, when the recession is over (Lynch, 2009). Governor Haley Barbour, a former Washington tobacco lobbyist, who is being touted as a presidential hopeful, proposed reducing school districts in the state from 152 to 100: placing authority in the high-performing school districts and eliminating the troubled, underfunded, frequently poor and rural districts. These reductions call into question if all students will have equal access to academic and support services. Equity can be sacrificed in times of financial exigency. The Mississippi governor proposed eliminating state services and facilities for delinquents, blind and deaf children, disabled citizens, and others in great need during hard economic times. Governor Barbour wants to close four of the state’s Department of Mental Health facilities, six crisis centers, and two branches of the state hospital (Lynch, 2009). This budget saving would ensure that chronically mentally ill persons are imprisoned in harsh jail settings or released to suffer on the streets. Powerful men advocate ongoing industrial and technological developments with tax incentives. They would feed the children with the crumbs that fall from the table. Patriarchs retain their privilege through attempts to control scarce resources: subjugating women and children and other vulnerable populations in the process. By creating fear in the great middle class, it is possible to blame the victims for their distress and protect the interests of affluent White men who have not forgotten the old ways of getting things done. Fear and threat are the tools of the politician. If we assume the best case scenario that the proposed budget cuts are only shrewd political moves that are unlikely to be accepted by the Mississippi legislature, one is left with a painful awareness of how little some of our leaders care about those

Pension Reforms In France: Impact On Growth And Inter-Generational Redistributive Effects

This paper assesses the impact on growth and the inter-generational redistributive effects of some possible pension reforms in France using a dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations. Results suggest that a reform increasing the effective average retirement age by 1.25 years per decade and diminishing the average replacement rate by around 6 percentage points up to 2020 could stabilise social contributions for the youngest, but would gradually foster the poverty rate among pensioners. On the other hand, a reform incorporating a rise in the age of retirement by 1.25 years per decade, unchanged replacement rates and a discretionary increase of all pensions of 2.5 per cent in 2008 would limit the poverty rate among pensioners, but it would weigh down on the growth rate and the welfare of future generations.

Review: Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution

Review: Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution By Frank Ackerman Reviewed by Peter C. Little Oregon State University, USA Ackerman, Frank. Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008. 317 pp. ISBN: 9781597264013. US$25.00, paper. Tapping into the always contentious territory of toxic substances, precautionary politics, and cost-benefit analysis and policy, Ackerman’s new book Poisoned for Pennies: The Economics of Toxics and Precaution is a righteous attempt to highlight the irrationality of pricing the “priceless.” In other words, once we know that exposures to certain toxic substances (e.g., dioxin, atrazine, arsenic, lead, polyvinyl chloride, azinphos-methyl, phosmet, etc.) are either possible or known to harm life, we are confronted with a moral heuristic dilemma because, as Ackerman points out, “There are no meaningful prices attached to protection of human life, health, nature, and the well-being of future generations, and no end of nonsense has resulted from the attempt to invent surrogate prices for them” (p.xiv). Surrogate pricing is the flaw of cost-benefit analysis and this surrogate pricing tactic allows toxics which are ubiquitous in our cultural and political economy to survive and remain embedded in our products and materials of and for consumption. This book offers a much needed critique of government agency—particularly the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—attempts to turn environmental health issues into a pricing game informed by an economic framework obsessed with weighing ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ to make critical public health and environmental policies and decisions. Regulating toxics, it is argued, calls for policies that go beyond calculating risk and treating quantification as the ‘end all, be all’. Arguing that we are in fact in a time when environmentalism is turning to rather than entirely against economics, Poisoned for Pennies contests cost-benefit analysis at the same time that it explores and offers realistic alternatives (e.g., ‘technology-based’ regulation, ‘pollution trading’, information or ‘right-to- know’ regulations, enforcing precautionary principles). Ackerman strips the cost-benefit analysis of health and environmental policy down to the nude to expose its many flaws, arguing that this economic phenomena and practice “systematically downgrades the importance of the future in two ways: through the technique of discounting, and through predictive methodologies that take inadequate account of the possibility of catastrophic and irreversible events” (p. 17). For example, Ackerman points to three types of data that are used, and therefore considered appropriate data, to calculate the costs of childhood illness due to environmental factors: the number of children affected by each disease, the costs per affected child, and the fraction of each disease attributable to environmental causes (p. 146). Decisions based on ‘environmentally attributable fractions’ or EAFs—a quantification method employed especially in debates regarding the role of environmental factors in the incidence of neurobehavioral disorders—are prone to obvious moral policy critique, a point which Ackerman alludes to in a chapter entitled “Costs of Preventable Childhood Illness.” Poisoned for Pennies not only attends to the “problem with the process of valuation” (p. 16), but also, and in a more subtle form, takes issue with the ubiquitous nature of toxics and in turn the multiple policy challenges this problem of toxic omnipresence creates for both regulators and activists alike. Aiming to provide an informative critique of the economic dominance of toxics debates, Ackerman showcases how this critique is progressive and not meant to sustain the demarcation of economists and environmentalists even though he states that “the world looks different to economists and environmentalists, because they view reality through rival frames” (p. 227). He admits that “it is no small challenge to integrate these clashing worldviews, to explain what economic analysis offers to environmental policy” (ibid.). Precautionary policies and the rise of the European Union’s REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals) are steps in the right direction (both for protecting future generations and even for being ‘cost-effective’ in the long run) as long as we remember—and this seems to be the take-

Extending a Life with Meaning

This essay questions Callahan’s criticism of people’s aspiration to extend their life. It argues that ideas about life are subject to historical variations and the question at issue is whether society can give meaning to aging. It also questions the claim that the radical extension of human life will jeopardize the welfare of future generations. It suggests that the application of the precautionary principle to the question of aging avoid facing up to question how society should value the old.

Choosing a Pension Reform: A Framework for the Social Planner

This chapter investigates the issue of which reform of the pay-as-you-go pension system a social planner should choose given its aversion to inter-generational inequality and its discount rate of the welfare of future generations. For this purpose, an applied normative economics methodology is develops which uses as a starting point the results of a dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations (GE-OLG). This model simulates the economic impact of different PAYG pension reforms in the United States, Japan, France and Germany.It shows that a social planner can hardly decide for one pension reform or another on the exclusive basis of the GDP criterion (except in the case of tax hikes balancing the regime which have sizable detrimental effects on the growth rate).Taking account of the inter-generational redistributive effects of the reforms thus becomes crucial for the social planner because it allows for discriminating between different possible scenarios. Freezing the age of retirement in an aging context triggers strong inter-generational redistributive effects, whereas reforms incorporating a rise in the average age of retirement limit strongly these inter-generational redistributive influences. However, in the four countries considered here, no pension reform is found to be Pareto-improving. Compared to a no-reform, baseline tax hikes scenario, PAYG pension reforms weigh down more or less on the inter-temporal welfare of the baby-boomers and increase the welfare of their children and of future generations.Social welfare functionals encapsulating a variable degree of aversion to inter-generational inequality and a variable discount rate of the welfare of future generations show that the social planner in the United States and Japan is likely to favor reforms bolstering private savings at unchanged age of retirement. In Germany and France, the social choice favors scenarios increasing the age of retirement. In all countries, the status quo corresponding to tax hikes balancing the pension regime characterizes a social planner with rawlsian preferences.

Does Sustainability Require a New Theory of Property Rights?

By demanding stewardship of natural capital over exploitation, sustainability envisions a property regime less committed to individual property rights than are the traditional and economic theories of property. While the traditional property theories of Blackstone, Locke, and U.S. constitutional doctrine tolerate restrictions on private property rights for the sake of public welfare, they resist the strongest versions of sustainability, which promote generational and social justice. Similarly, an economic analysis of property recognizes the values of resource conservation and welfare for future generations, but only to the limited extent the economist can calculate future value. As a result, economic analysis may overlook or undervalue the interests of remote generations. Moreover, the goal of a more egalitarian distribution of resources, which informs the social justice model of sustainability theory, runs counter to the dominant economic analysis of property. Only relational principles at the fringes of property theory in the United States can fully embrace the strongest versions of sustainability. Thus, absent an unlikely theoretical revolution in the U.S., the sustainable development agenda cannot succeed in this country at the level required by the international community.

Does Sustainability Require a New Theory of Property Rights?

By demanding stewardship of natural capital over exploitation, sustainability envisions a property regime less committed to individual property rights than are the traditional and economic theories of property. While the traditional property theories of Blackstone, Locke, and U.S. constitutional doctrine tolerate restrictions on private property rights for the sake of public welfare, they resist the strongest versions of sustainability, which promote generational and social justice. Similarly, an economic analysis of property recognizes the values of resource conservation and welfare for future generations, but only to the limited extent the economist can calculate future value. As a result, economic analysis may overlook or undervalue the interests of remote generations. Moreover, the goal of a more egalitarian distribution of resources, which informs the social justice model of sustainability theory, runs counter to the dominant economic analysis of property. Only relational principles at the fringes of property theory in the United States can fully embrace the strongest versions of sustainability. Thus, absent an unlikely theoretical revolution in the U.S., the sustainable development agenda cannot succeed in this country at the level required by the international community. Forthcoming in The Kansas Law Review, vol. 58, no. 1 (2009)

International and Intergenerational Aspects of Capital Income Taxation in an Endogenously Growing World Economy

AbstractThis paper discusses how capital income taxation affects economic growth and welfare in an endogenously growing world economy with perfect capital mobility and worldwide externalities. Worldwide externalities provide a mechanism for equalizing national growth rates even with different capital income tax rates. The welfare of future generations is more influenced by a change in the growth rate than by the international spillover effect, which has been the primary concern of the previous studies. Moreover, our model finds intergenerational conflicts arising from the change in the growth rate caused by a change in the source tax rate of the foreign country.

Anthropogenic climate change: Scientific uncertainties and moral dilemmas

This paper considers the role of scientific expertise and moral reasoning in the decision making process involved in climate-change issues. It points to an unresolved moral dilemma that lies at the heart of this decision making, namely how to balance duties towards future generations against duties towards our contemporaries. At present, the prevailing moral and political discourses shy away from addressing this dilemma and evade responsibility by falsely drawing normative conclusions from the predictions of climate models alone. We argue that such moral dilemmas are best addressed in the framework of Expected Utility Theory. A crucial issue is to adequately incorporate into this framework the uncertainties associated with the predicted consequences of climate change on the well-being of future generations. The uncertainties that need to be considered include those usually associated with climate modeling and prediction, but also moral and general epistemic ones. This paper suggests a way to correctly incorporate all the relevant uncertainties into the decision making process.