24 found
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  1.  20
    Population Issues in Social Choice Theory, Welfare Economics, and Ethics.Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David J. Donaldson - 2005 - Cambridge University Press.
    This book presents an exploration of the idea of the common or social good, extended so that alternatives with different populations can be ranked. The approach is, in the main, welfarist, basing rankings on the well-being, broadly conceived, of those who are alive. The axiomatic method is employed, and topics investigated include: the measurement of individual well-being, social attitudes toward inequality of well-being, the main classes of population principles, principles that provide incomplete rankings, principles that rank uncertain alternatives, best choices (...)
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  2. Anonymous welfarism, critical-level principles, and the repugnant and sadistic conclusions.Walter Bossert - 2022 - In Gustaf Arrhenius, Krister Bykvist, Tim Campbell & Elizabeth Finneron-Burns (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Population Ethics. Oxford University Press.
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  3. Critical-level utilitarianism and the population-ethics dilemma.Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David Donaldson - 1997 - Economics and Philosophy 13 (2):197-.
    Advances in technology have made it possible for us to take actions that affect the numbers and identities of humans and other animals that will live in the future. Effective and inexpensive birth control, child allowances, genetic screening, safe abortion, in vitro fertilization, the education of young women, sterilization programs, environmental degradation and war all have these effects. Although it is true that a good deal of effort has been devoted to the practical side of population policy, moral theory has (...)
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  4.  53
    Critical‐level Sufficientarianism.Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato & Kohei Kamaga - 2021 - Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (4):434-461.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  5.  41
    Thresholds, critical levels, and generalized sufficientarian principles.Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato & Kohei Kamaga - 2023 - Economic Theory 75 (4):1099–1139.
    This paper provides an axiomatic analysis of sufficientarian social evaluation. Sufficientarianism has emerged as an increasingly important notion of distributive justice. We propose a class of principles that we label generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings. The distinguishing feature of our new class is that its members exhibit constant critical levels of well-being that are allowed to differ from the threshold of sufficiency. Our basic axiom assigns priority to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous other sufficientarian approaches. (...)
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  6.  24
    Revisiting variable-value population principles.Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato & Kohei Kamaga - 2023 - Economics and Philosophy 39 (3):468-484.
    We examine a general class of variable-value population principles. Our particular focus is on the extent to which such principles can avoid the repugnant and sadistic conclusions. We show that if a mild limit property is imposed, avoidance of the repugnant conclusion implies the sadistic conclusion. This result generalizes earlier observations by showing that they apply to a substantially larger class of principles. Our second theorem states that, under the limit property, the axiom of mere addition also conflicts with avoidance (...)
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  7. External norms and rationality of choice.Walter Bossert & Kotaro Suzumura - 2009 - Economics and Philosophy 25 (2):139-152.
    Ever since Sen criticized the notion of internal consistency of choice, there exists a widespread perception that the standard rationalizability approach to the theory of choice has difficulties in coping with the existence of external norms. We introduce a concept of norm-conditional rationalizability and show that external norms can be made compatible with the methods underlying the traditional rationalizability approach. To do so, we characterize norm-conditional rationalizability by means of suitable modifications of revealed preference axioms that are well established in (...)
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  8.  19
    Incommensurability and consistency.Walter Bossert - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (12):3235-3251.
    Public-policy choices frequently have to be carried out in the presence of incommensurabilities. These incommensurabilities may manifest themselves in the form of incompleteness—that is, some of the options under consideration are not comparable by a decision maker. As a consequence, it may be impossible to select policies that are at least as good as all competing proposals. When faced with incommensurabilities of this nature, transitivity can be considered too demanding a requirement. An attractive weakening of transitivity consists of a property (...)
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  9. Quasi-orderings and population ethics.Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David Donaldson - 1996 - Social Choice and Welfare 13 (2):129--150.
    Population ethics contains several principles that avoid the repugnant conclusion. These rules rank all possible alternatives, leaving no room for moral ambiguity. Building on a suggestion of Parfit, this paper characterizes principles that provide incomplete but ethically attractive rankings of alternatives with different population sizes. All of them rank same-number alternatives with generalized utilitarianism.
     
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  10.  61
    Extensive social choice and the measurement of group fitness in biological hierarchies.Walter Bossert, Chloe X. Qi & John A. Weymark - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (1):75-98.
    Extensive social choice theory is used to study the problem of measuring group fitness in a two-level biological hierarchy. Both fixed and variable group size are considered. Axioms are identified that imply that the group measure satisfies a form of consequentialism in which group fitness only depends on the viabilities and fecundities of the individuals at the lower level in the hierarchy. This kind of consequentialism can take account of the group fitness advantages of germ-soma specialization, which is not possible (...)
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  11.  56
    Preference extension rules for ranking sets of alternatives with a fixed cardinality.Walter Bossert - 1995 - Theory and Decision 39 (3):301-317.
  12. The Axiomatic Approach to Population Ethics.Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David Donaldson - 2002 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 2 (3):342-381.
    This article examines several families of population principles in the light of a set of axioms. In addition to the critical-level utilitarian, number-sensitive critical-level utilitarian, and number-dampened utilitarian families and their generalized counterparts, we consider the restricted number-dampened family and introduce two new ones: the restricted critical-level and restricted number-dependent critical-level families. Subsets of the restricted families have non-negative critical levels, avoid the `repugnant conclusion' and satisfy the axiom priority for lives worth living, but violate an important independence condition.
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  13.  79
    Choices, consequences, and rationality.Walter Bossert - 2001 - Synthese 129 (3):343 - 369.
    A generalized theory of revealed preference is formulated for choice situations where the consequences of choices from given menus are uncertain. In a nonprobabilistic framework, rational choice behavior can be defined by requiring the existence of a preference relation on the set of possible consequences and an extension rule for this relation to the power set of the set of consequences such that the chosen sets of possible outcomes are the best elements in the feasible set according to this extension (...)
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  14.  24
    Independent, neutral, and monotonic collective choice: the role of Suzumura consistency.Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato & Kohei Kamaga - 2023 - Social Choice and Welfare 61:835–852.
    We examine the impact of Suzumura’s (Economica 43:381–390, 1976) consistency property when applied in the context of collective choice rules that are independent of irrelevant alternatives, neutral, and monotonic. An earlier contribution by Blau and Deb (Econometrica 45:871–879, 1977) establishes the existence of a vetoer if the collective relation is required to be complete and acyclical. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that result if completeness and acyclicity are dropped and Suzumura consistency is imposed instead. A (...)
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  15.  32
    Generalized poverty-gap orderings.Walter Bossert, Susumu Cato & Kohei Kamaga - 2022 - Social Indicators Research 164 (1):189–215.
    This paper provides a characterization of a new class of ordinal poverty measures that are defined by means of the aggregate generalized poverty gap. To be precise, we propose to use the sum of the differences between the transformed fixed poverty line and the transformed level of income of each person below the line as our measure. If the transformation is strictly concave, the resulting measure is strictly inequality averse with respect to the incomes of the poor. In analogy to (...)
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  16. Utilitarianism and the Theory of Justice.Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David Donaldson - 1999 - School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
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  17.  12
    Acyclicity, anonymity, and prefilters.Walter Bossert & Susumu Cato - 2020 - Journal of Mathematical Economics 87:134–141.
    We analyze the decisiveness structures associated with acyclical collective choice rules. In particular, we examine the consequences of adding anonymity to weak Pareto, thereby complementing earlier results on acyclical social choice. Both finite and countably infinite populations are considered. As established in contributions by Donald Brown and by Jeffrey Banks, acyclical social choice is closely linked to prefilters in the presence of the weak Pareto principle. We introduce the notion of a conditional prefilter and use it to generalize their results. (...)
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  18.  12
    Superset-robust collective choice rules.Walter Bossert & Susumu Cato - 2021 - Mathematical Social Sciences 109:126–136.
    A new property of collective choice rules that we refer to as superset robustness is introduced, and we employ it in several characterization results. The axiom requires that if all individual preference orderings expand weakly (in the sense of set inclusion), then the corresponding social preference relation must also expand weakly. In other words, if a given profile is changed by adding instances of weak preference to some individual relations, then the social weak preference relation for the expanded profile must (...)
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  19. Population Ethics.Chuck Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David Donaldson - 2009 - In Paul Anand, Prasanta Pattanaik & Clemens Puppe (eds.), Handbook of Rational and Social Choice. Oxford University Press.
     
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  20.  24
    Citing paper cited paper.Walter Bossert - manuscript
    in Economics . The data is obtained through machine analysis of the full text files for papers available in EconPapers. Currently only freely available full text files are analysed and results are only included for files which could be parsed without errors.
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  21.  63
    Measuring group fitness in a biological hierarchy: An axiomatic social choice approach.Walter Bossert, Chloe X. Qi & John A. Weymark - 2013 - Economics and Philosophy 29 (3):301-323.
    This article illustrates how axiomatic social choice theory can be used in the evaluation of measures of group fitness for a biological hierarchy, thereby contributing to the dialogue between the philosophy of biology and social choice theory. It provides an axiomatic characterization of the ordering underlying the MichodSolariNedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism. The MVSHN index has been used to analyse the germ-soma specialization and the fitness decoupling between the cell and organism levels that takes place during (...)
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  22.  63
    Maximal-Element Rationalizability.Walter Bossert, Yves Sprumont & Kotaro Suzumura - 2005 - Theory and Decision 58 (4):325-350.
    We examine the maximal-element rationalizability of choice functions with arbitrary domains. While rationality formulated in terms of the choice of greatest elements according to a rationalizing relation has been analyzed relatively thoroughly in the earlier literature, this is not the case for maximal-element rationalizability, except when it coincides with greatest-element rationalizability because of properties imposed on the rationalizing relation. We develop necessary and sufficient conditions for maximal-element rationalizability by itself, and for maximal-element rationalizability in conjunction with additional properties of a (...)
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  23.  34
    Non-deteriorating Choice Without Full Transitivity.Walter Bossert & Kotaro Suzumura - 2007 - Analyse & Kritik 29 (2):163-187.
    Although the theory of greatest-element rationalizability and maximalelement rationalizability on general domains and without full transitivity of rationalizing relations is well-developed in the literature, these standard notions of rational choice are often considered to be too demanding. An alternative definition of rationality of choice is that of non-deteriorating choice, which requires that the chosen alternatives must be judged at least as good as a reference alternative. In game theory, this definition is well-known under the name of individual rationality when the (...)
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  24. (1 other version)Rational Choice on General Domains.Walter Bossert & Kotaro Suzumura - 2008 - In Kaushik Basu & Ravi Kanbur (eds.), Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen: Volume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement and Volume Ii: Society, Institutions, and Development. Oxford University Press.
     
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