Balancing the interests of the present and the future

From an ethical perspective intergenerational discounting often is justified by the desire to avoid distributions of welfare that are immoderately unbalanced in favor of future generations. In this paper it is shown in a two-generation framework that for productive economies it is well possible to use undiscounted utilitarianism instead in order to make ethically acceptable choices on intergenerational distributions. When intergenerational discounting is nevertheless used as a pragmatic device it also follows from our approach that time-inconsistency might no longer be an important problem.