  What are we to make of the ethics of discounting the well-beings of future generations? Ramsey (1928) began by dismissing it but then studied it at the tail end of his paper. DM could of course justify discounting future well-being if there is a possibiliy of future extinction. Sidgwick (1907) himself noted that in the passage quoted earlier. If Classical Utilitarianism is taken to commend the expected sum of well-beings, then the “hazard rate” at date \(t\) (i.e., the probability of extinction at date \(t\) conditional on society surviving until \(t)\) would appear in the expression for expected well-being as a discount rate for well-being at \(t\). The question remains whether Classical Utilitarianism would insist on zero-discounting of future utilities in a deterministic world.