Sen's Liberal Paradox has received a good deal of attention in the literature. However, it is worth re-opening the discussion since the solutions offered so far have serious problems and since there is more to say about the nature of the problem displayed by the Liberal Paradox. I propose a new solution to the paradox in the following sense: First, I argue that its range of applicability is not very broad. Second, there is nothing paradoxical about a conflict of the (...) principles involved in the Liberal Paradox. (Nagel's thesis of the ``fragmentation of value'' is important to make this point.) Third, I make a recommendation about how to remove conflicts when they occur in a restricted class of cases. For the other cases, no recommendation of similar appeal is available. But in the light of the first point, the availability of a generally applicable recommendation was not to be expected. (shrink)

A claim that certain purely private matters should be beyond the reach of society's laws, moral rules, and other customs is central to the distinctive liberalism of John Stuart Mill. On Liberty, perhaps the most eloquent defense of individual liberty ever written, laments the hostility allegedly displayed in modern mass societies toward “the right of each individual to act [in private matters] as seems good to his judgement and inclinations”. In Mill's view, a free society must design its institutions with (...) due regard for what he terms “individuality.” That is, public authority, whether in the form of law, customary opinion, or economic power, must be self-limiting so that it does not interfere with the rights of individuals to choose as they like with respect to such private concerns as religious faith, reading materials, living companions, and consumption of drugs and alcohol. Individuals and voluntary groups should be permitted to do whatever they prefer within their private spheres even if everyone else in society dislikes what they do, is annoyed by them, and actually chooses not to be around them or to befriend them. (shrink)

In 1970 Amartya Sen exposed an apparent antinomy that has come to be known as the Paradox of the Paretian Libertarian. Sen introduced his paradox by establishing a simple but startling theorem. Roughly put, what he proved was that if a mechanism for selecting social choice functions satisfies two standard adequacy conditions, there are possible situations in which it will violate either the very weak libertarian precept that every individual has at least some rights or the seemingly innocuous Paretian principle (...) that an option should be judged unacceptable if there is an available alternative that everyone prefers to it. Many economists and philosophers have proposed solutions to Sen's problem, but there is no general consensus on what solution is correct. In the present paper I argue that Sen's original theorem fails to establish the existence of any conflict between libertarianism and Paretianism. Furthermore, I contend that Sen has misinterpreted certain other theorems which he has used to defend the existence of a paradoxical conflict between these two doctrines. In general, I try to show that whenever Sen posits a Paretian-libertarian conflict to explain an apparently troubling result in social choice theory, the difficulty can be better dealt with either by claiming that the theorem in question imposes overly strong background constraints on the form of social choice functions or by claiming that it relies on an unacceptable construal of individual rights. (shrink)

This paper develops a conceptual framework, which can accommodate a wide range of value judgements used in ethical evaluations of extended social states and which can be used to differentiate different categories of value judgements by referring to the type of information on which they may be based. The notions of consequentialism, non-consequentialism, exclusive focus on personal well-being, exclusive focus on utility, etc. are conceptualized in operational ways in the framework. The framework and the discussion of different types of ethical (...) criteria that may be used in evaluating extended social states contribute to conceptual clarity about the ethical bases of public policies. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill provides a classic defense of individual and group rights to liberty with respect to purely private or self-regarding matters: The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself … directly, and in the first instance, … his independence is, of right, absolute.… From this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; (...) freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to introduce a Cartesian product structure into the social choice theoretical framework and to examine if new possibility results to Gibbard’s and Sen’s paradoxes can be developed thanks to it. We believe that a Cartesian product structure is a pertinent way to describe individual rights in the social choice theory since it discriminates the personal features comprised in each social state. First we define some conceptual and formal tools related to the Cartesian product structure. (...) We then apply these notions to Gibbard’s paradox and to Sen’s impossibility of a Paretian liberal. Finally we compare the advantages of our approach to other solutions proposed in the literature for both impossibility theorems. (shrink)

This paper is about the measurement of specific freedoms freedom functionbeing free to performconditional probability of success.negative freedom is membership of powerful coalitions.”.

This is a comprehensive anthology of works concerning the nature of economics as a science, including classic texts and essays exploring specific branches and schools of economics. Apart from the classics, most of the selections in the third edition are new, as are the introduction and bibliography. No other anthology spans the whole field and offers a comprehensive introduction to questions about economic methodology.

This thesis concerns the measurement of freedom, and its value. Specifically, I am concerned with three overarching questions. First, can we measure the extent of an individual’s freedom? It had better be that we can, otherwise much ordinary and intuitive talk that we would like to vindicate – say, about free persons being freer than slaves – will turn out to be false or meaningless. Second, in what ways is freedom valuable, and how is this value measured? It matters, for (...) example, whether freedom is valuable only insofar as it enables us to pursue specific ends we happen to value for independent reasons, or whether it is also valuable in itself. In the latter case, but not the former, more freedom will always be better. Likewise, it’s important to get clarity on what ends, exactly, freedom is especially instrumentally valuable in promoting, since this goes to how much we should care about it. And finally, the liberal political tradition asserts that there is a special sphere of personal choices within which individuals should be free to do as they please, for reasons over and above the value of freedom itself. Now, can we measure the extent to which states and individuals respect individual liberties, and can we weigh the importance of respecting liberty against competing values like social welfare? To answer these questions, I follow the axiomatic tradition of social choice theory, and I develop several novel measures of freedom – including the first measure of freedom ever proposed that is sensitive to how modally robustly our options are available – a novel approach to measuring the diversity of an opportunity set, and I develop an account of the value of freedom according to which an important part of why freedom matters is that it enables us to improve our preferences through learning, and I construct ways of measuring the value of freedom along this dimension of value. Finally, in later chapters, I provide a representation result for a measure of illiberalism, i.e. of the degree to which states fail to respect the rights of their citizens, and I extend this result to provide a characterization of moral theories that express concern for respecting the rights of others. The final chapter closes by discussing how this concern may be weighed against concerns for social welfare. (shrink)