Recent debates over climate change policy have made it clear that the choice of a social discount rate has enormous consequences for the amount of mitigation that will be recommended. The social discount rate determines how future costs are to be compared to present costs. Philosophers, however, have been almost unanimous in endorsing the view that the only acceptable social rate of time preference is zero, a view that, taken literally, has either absurd or extremely radical implications. The first goal of this paper is to show that the standard arguments against temporal preference are much less persuasive than they are usually taken to be. The second goal is to explore two different avenues of argument that could be adopted, in order to show that temporal discounting of welfare may be permissible. The first involves simply an application of the method of reflective equilibrium, while the second involves consideration of the way that our abstract moral commitments are institutionalized.

中文翻译：

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气候伦理：证明积极的社会时间偏好

最近关于气候变化政策的辩论已经清楚地表明，社会贴现率的选择对建议的缓解量产生巨大影响。社会贴现率决定了如何将未来成本与当前成本进行比较。然而，哲学家们几乎一致同意唯一可接受的社会时间偏好率为零的观点，从字面上看，这种观点具有荒谬或极端激进的含义。本文的第一个目标是表明反对时间偏好的标准论点比通常认为的更有说服力。第二个目标是探索可以采用的两种不同的论证方式，以表明福利的时间折扣可能是允许的。