Some remarks on the ranking of infinite utility streams

This chapter first discusses some pre-orders which are the infinite horizon versions of classic utilitarianism and the leximin principles. There are two different ways in which leximin and utilitarianism have been extended to the infinite horizon context. The chapter uses some simple examples to illustrate how these different approaches compare with one another, and argues informally that one method is perhaps better than the other. Second, it shows that Separability along with a weak version of the Pareto axiom implies that any social welfare ordering of infinite utility streams must exhibit time preference over a limited class of comparisons