Sen on Rationality, Commitment and Preferences

This article discusses Sen’s critique of the behavioral implications of revealed preference theory. Sen proposes the concept of commitment as a way to account for the possibility of counter-preferential choice. More generally, it is part of an argument against the thesis that rationality may be reduced to some criteria of internal consistency of choices. The main purpose of this paper is to show that though commitment is more often discussed in the context of Sen’s critique of various consistency axioms of choice such as the transitivity axiom, this concept is also deeply related to the Sen’s equally significant evaluation of the completeness axiom. Comparing Sen’s account to John Searle’s critique of the classical model of rationality, I suggest that Sen uses the commitment concept as a more general critique of the Humean paradigm where “reason is the slave of passions”. Sen’s latest concerns with public reasoning and partial orderings indicate an attempt of his part to go beyond the Humean paradigm of rationality and to reflect on the way preferences are formed and constructed through rational deliberation.