Current policies can affect future generations differently from how they affect the current generation. How can policy decisions be made that equitably account for the effects on future generations? A global preference order on policies which makes some attempt to account for the preferences of individual generations without favouring one over another is called a social welfare order. Unfortunately even weak requirements on social welfare orders result in their being impossible to explicitly construct. More precisely, the axiom of choice is required to demonstrate the existence of reasonable social welfare orders, as demonstrated by Dubey and Laguzzi.

In a positive direction, we put an upper bound on the strength of choice principle needed by proving that two types of social welfare order, called SEA and ANIP in the literature, exist in models of choiceless set theory with no nonprincipal ultrafilters on the natural numbers. This answers a question of Dubey and Laguzzi. The author gratefully acknowledges the patient advising of Justin Moore and Paul Larson through this project, which is joint work with Azul Fatalini.