16/4/2020
Announcement of April 24 Sophia University Seminar in Economics
Let me inform you of the following online research seminar.
Date: April 24, 2020
Time: 14:10-16:10
Venue: Online Seminar in Zoom (See below)
Organizer: Kohei Kamaga and Takuya Hasebe
1st talk：14:10-15:10
Speaker：Susumu Cato (University of Tokyo)
Language：Japanese
Title：Critical-level sufficientarianism (jointly with Walter Bossert and Kohei Kamaga)
Abstract：This paper provides an axiological foundation of a class of sufficientarian principles that are based on the individual transformed well-being gains and losses from a threshold level. The ideas underlying these principles have their origins in the literature on population ethics. We characterize this class by showing that its members are the only principles that possess some intuitively appealing properties. One of these conditions explicitly expresses the absolute priority to be given to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous earlier sufficientarian approaches. In addition, we examine well-established conditions that prescribe the consequences of progressive transfers and identify the subclass of our principles that satisfy the requisite requirements.
2nd talk：15:10-16:10
Speaker：Kohei Kamaga (Sophia University)
Language：Japanese
Title：Thresholds of sufficiency and critical levels (jointly with Walter Bossert and Susumu Cato)
Abstract：This paper provides an axiomatic analysis of sufficientarianism in a variable-population setting. We propose the class of generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings that extend the orderings introduced by Bossert, Cato, and Kamaga (2020). The distinguishing feature of our new class is that its members exhibit constant critical levels that are allowed to differ from the threshold of sufficiency. Our basic axiom assigns absolute priority to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous other sufficientarian approaches. When combined with the well-known strong-Pareto principle and the assumption that there be a constant critical level, the axiom implies that the critical level cannot be below the threshold. The main results of the paper are characterizations of our new class and an important subclass. As a final result, we identify the generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings that permit us to avoid the repugnant conclusion and the sadistic conclusion.