Grégory Ponthière

Les économistes mesurent le dommage causé par un décès en quantifiant le coût d’opportunité de ce décès (tout ce qui est perdu par le défunt à cause de ce décès). Ce calcul contredit la thèse de la neutralité de la mort défendue par divers philosophes depuis l’Antiquité. Cet article revisite plusieurs arguments anciens justifiant la neutralité de la mort et, par un effet de contraste, révèle des présupposés de l’analyse économique de la mort, tels le caractère consolidé des vies et le caractère cumulable du bien-être dans le temps.

This paper examines the relevancy of the Ecological Footprint indicator for the study of environmental justice between generations. While EF statistics - measuring the pressure put on nature by generations co-existing at a particular period under the prevailing production technology - can hardly be interpreted on its own, it is argued that interpretational difficulties vanish once the EF is corrected for changes in technology, and once it is made explicit that the EF is concerned with environmental justice. Thus, what should be interpreted is not a single EF statistic, but the entire EF distribution. Moreover, although usual interpretations of EF consist of comparing the actual pressure put on nature with the one allowing nature's regeneration, it is argued that this physical interpretation is not the only possible one, and that EF measures allow a - normative and descriptive - study of intergenerational justice under ethical frameworks other than resources-centred sustainability.

Alors que la défense d'une organisation davantage démocratique de la production est souvent basée sur une réduction implicite du bien-être de la population au bien-être d'un sous-groupe de celle-ci, cet article a pour objectif d'étudier la désirabilité de la démocratie d'entreprise du point de vue d'un observateur impartial se mettant dans la position de tous les membres de la population et évaluant, à la lumière des intérêts de chacun, le bien-fondé d'une démocratisation de la production. Il est montré que la désirabilité, du point de vue de l'observateur impartial, de la démocratie d'entreprise dépend de l'importance du revenu, de la reconnaissance sociale et de l'autonomie en tant que déterminants du bien-être, mais, aussi, de l'évolution de la partition de la population entre travailleurs non actionnaires, travailleurs actionnaires et actionnaires non travailleurs. Vu que les jugements de l'observateur impartial sont sensibles à la forme sous laquelle la composition de la population est prise en compte, la question de la désirabilité de la démocratie d'entreprise exige rien de moins qu'une réexamination du concept d'impartialité dans le contexte d'une population hétérogène à composition variable.

Alors que l'approche économique traditionnelle des discriminations tend à réduire les goûts des décideurs aux choix des décideurs, cet article introduit une distinction entre, d'une part, la discrimination in gustibus, c'est-à-dire la prise en compte, par le décideur, de caractéristiques non pertinentes pour le choix en question, et, d'autre part, la discrimination de facto, c'est-à-dire le choix traitant différemment des individus égaux sur des caractéristiques pertinentes. Il est montré que ces deux formes de discriminations ne sont nullement équivalentes, et que l'efficacité de diverses politiques anti-discriminations est dépendante du type - ou des types - de discriminations en présence.

This chapter presents four arguments supporting an age-differentiated tax on bequests, that is, a tax rate on bequests that is varying with the age of the deceased. Whereas those arguments are based on various ethical foundations, and lead to an inheritance tax that can be either increasing or decreasing with the age of the deceased, our comparative analysis leads us to regard one of these arguments as more convincing than the three others: the argument supporting a bequest tax increasing with the age of the deceased, on the grounds of the compensation of unlucky prematurely dead persons in a world of imperfect information.

The Welfare State insures citizens against the risk of losing one’s job (unemployment insurance), the risk of disease (health insurance), the risk of old-age poverty (pension insurance) and the risk of fertility (family allowances). However, the Welfare State does not insure citizens against the most dramatic of all risks: the risk of having a short life, that is, the risk of premature death. Worse: existing pension systems organize implicit monetary transfers from short-lived persons to long-lived persons, against any logic of compensation. The universal uncertainty about the length of life and the ideal of social justice look irreconcilable. Is a social insurance against a short life possible? What form should this insurance device take? How could one reform pension systems to make these less unjust for the short-lived? The present essay proposes clear and synthetic answers to these questions. It is first argued that, even though victims of a premature death and damages due to a short life are invisible, victims of a short life are harmed, to an extent that depends on the quantity and the quality of the life-years that would have been lived in the absence of a premature death, elements that depend on how societies allocate benefits and burdens across the ages of life. It is also argued that, although standard ethical approaches such as utilitarianism and Rawlsian liberal-egalitarianism would not justify compensating the short-lived, it is possible to legitimate the compensation of the (future) short-lived persons on the grounds of their most urgent needs to live good things during their – limited – lifetime. Obstacles to the construction of a social insurance against a short life are numerous. Persons who will turn out to die prematurely in the future cannot be identified ex ante, when they are still alive. But once the duration of life is known (ex post), it is generally too late to intervene to compensate the short-lived, since he is dead. However, despite these obstacles, it is possible to construct a social insurance against a short life, by acknowledging that all short-lived persons used to belong to younger age groups. Hence, the quality of their (short) life can be improved by adopting a simple maxim recommending the allocation of the ‘good things of life’ at young ages and the ‘bad things of life’ at older ages. Age-based statistical discrimination favouring the young can reduce welfare losses due to a premature death. A social insurance against a short life requires a reverse retirement system, that is, a system where young adults enjoy a retirement period before starting their career. Under this system, pension allowances paid to young adults would be funded by the labour of senior workers. Reverse retirement would make retirement available to everyone, and would improve the situation of the young, who include the (unidentified) future short-lived. By laying the foundations of a social insurance against a short life, reverse retirement would reconcile the universal uncertainty about the age at death with the requirements of social justice.

When considering the social valuation of a life-year, there is a conflict between two basic intuitions: on the one hand, the intuition of universality, according to which the value of an additional life-year should be universal, and, as such, should be invariant to the context considered; on the other hand, the intuition of complementarity, according to which the value of a life-year should depend on what this extra-life-year allows for, and, hence, on the quality of that life-year, because the quantity of life and the quality of life are complement to each other. This paper proposes three distinct accounts of the intuition of universality, and shows that those accounts either conflict with a basic monotonicity property, or lead to indifference with respect to how life-years are distributed within the population. Those results support the abandon of the intuition of universality. But abandoning the intuition of universality does not prevent a social evaluator from giving priority, when allocating life-years, to individuals with the lowest quality of life.

Whereas the Risk Equity axiom, discussed by Diamond (1967), states that, when the expected number of fatalities is the same in two distributions of fatal risks, a more equitable distribution of risks should be preferred to a less equitable distribution of risks, the Preference for Catastrophe Avoidance axiom, introduced by Kenney (1980), states, on the contrary, that, when facing the same choice, one should prefer a distribution in which at least some people survive to a distribution in which it may be the case that no one survives. This paper aims at emphasizing the relevancy of the two - incompatible - axioms for the study of intergenerational justice, and, in particular, for the study of nuclear ethics. For that purpose, the plausibility of each axiom is examined, and it is argued that, although the Risk Equity axiom is more plausible when the expected number of existing generations is low, the Preference for Catastrophe Avoidance axiom is more attractive when that number is large. Given that the ethical acceptability of the intergenerational distribution of risks implied by nuclear programs depends, ceteris paribus, on the adherence to the Risk Equity axiom, it is concluded that the energy debate can hardly avoid an examination of the treatment of distributions of risks of non-existence across potential generations.

According to Burri, a major reason why suicide is often irrational lies in the option value of life. Remaining alive is valuable because this allows for a larger menu of options, and the possibility of committing suicide in the future adds further value to the act of remaining alive now. In this note, I represent life as a trust game played by two selves – the young self and the old self – and I argue that the possibility to commit suicide in the future can encourage committing suicide now, against what the theory of the option value of life predicts.