Equity Axioms for Public Risks

From the perspective of a two-person society, we explain and analyze six axioms for equity among individuals who are exposed to the possibility of death from a public hazard. The axioms are concerned with how a given total risk (expected fatalities) is distributed over the four possible life/death consequences for the two people. Maximal subsets of mutually compatible equity axioms are identified first for a monotonic ordinal utility function and then for a more restrictive von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function.