Abstract
This paper is concerned with examining the mutual compatibility of the ethical principles of equity and liberty in a social choice framework of ordinally formulated vague preferences. With sufficiently weakened versions of the liberty and equity principles, one can secure an existence result in a ‘relation-functional’ setting. However, difficulties tend to re-appear in a ‘choice-functional’ setting, when one subscribes to the notion that while preference may be vague, choice must perforce be exact.
This chapter draws heavily and directly on a previously published paper of the author's, the content from which is re-used here with the permission of the copyright holder. S. Subramanian (2010) Liberty, equality, and impossibility: some general results in the space of ‘soft’ preferences, Journal of Economic Policy Reform, 13:4, 325–341. https://doi.org/10.1080/17487870.2010.523970.
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Subramanian, S. (2021). Liberty, Equality, and Impossibility: Some General Results in the Space of ‘Soft’ Preferences. In: Social Values and Social Indicators. Themes in Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0428-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0428-7_4
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