Abstract
This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John Stuart Mill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage of choice, but in the ordered collection of choices that a person can make in her life. We then suggest to represent a life in a tree structure, where each node represents a state of life and the edges between nodes will represent possible decisions in life. In this new framework, we propose a set of axioms that imply the following family of measures of lifetime’s freedom of choice: the lifetime’s freedom of choice has to be evaluated by a weighted sum of all possible states of life an individual might visit, with weights representing the number of decisions the individual took to reach that state.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Salvador Barbera, for expanding our tree of life, guiding our learning and thereby giving us the chance to choose to participate in the scientific community of scholars working on Social Choice and Welfare Economics. We all feel indebted to Salvador. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through grants ECO2008-04756, ECO2009-11213, ECO2009-12836, Ramon y Cajal program, FEDER, and the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA is gratefully acknowledged.
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Alcalde-Unzu, J., Ballester, M.A. & Nieto, J. Freedom of choice: John Stuart Mill and the tree of life. SERIEs 3, 209–226 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8