Abstract
I argue that the liberty condition of Sen's important impossibility of a Paretian liberal result is not a condition that liberals (or libertarians) would accept. The problem is that an appropriate liberty condition must be formulated in terms of consent - not in terms of preference. To formulate an adequate condition the framework needs to expand from collective choice rules (which only take information about preferences as input) to rights-based social choice rules (which also take as input information about which options have been consented to and which would violate someone's rights). I formulate a more adequate liberty condition based on the notion of consent that is acceptable to liberals, and then show that Pareto optimality is incompatible even with that condition. I then show how the liberty condition can be weakened in a plausible manner, and describe an interesting class of theories - rights-based Paretian theories - that satisfy the Pareto optimality requirement while being sensitive to liberty considerations.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Austen-Smith, D.: 1982, ‘Restricted Pareto and Rights’,Journal of Economic Theory 26, 90–99.
Barry, B.: 1986, ‘Lady Chatterly's Lover and Doctor Fischer's Bomb Party’, in Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland (eds.),Foundation of Social Choice Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Gibbard, A.: 1973, ‘Manipulation of Voting Schemes: A General Result’,Econometrica 41, 587–601.
Gibbard, A.: 1974, ‘A Pareto-Consistent Pareto Claim’,Journal of Economic Theory 7, 388–410.
Nozick, R.: 1974,Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books.
Sen, A. K.: 1970,Collective Choice and Social Welfare, San Francisco: Holden-Day.
Sen, A. K.: 1976, ‘Liberty, Unanimity, and Rights’,Economica 43, 217–246.
Vallentyne, P.: 1988, ‘Rights Based Paretianism’,Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18, 527–544.
Wriglesworth, J. L.: 1985,Libertarian Conflicts in Social Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Vallentyne, P. How to combine pareto optimality with liberty considerations. Theor Decis 27, 217–240 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00135097
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00135097