ABSTRACT
The preceding analysis, like much of the other literature on optimal growth theory, was utilitarian in the sense that the social welfare functional was defined as a weighted sum of the utilities of the various generations. Such an approach to social choice has come under strong attack recently from John Rawls [23]. He argues that the appropriate goal for a society should be the maximization of the welfare of the least fortunate thus, in effect, ruling out the possibility of trading off the losses of some against the gains of the other. Unlike a utilitarian, a Rawlsian would try to maximize the lowest individual utility.
