On the impossibility of complete Non-Interference in Paretian social judgements

Liberal approaches to ranking infinite utility streams: when can we avoid interference?

In this work we analyse social welfare relations on sets of infinite utility streams that verify various types of liberal non-interference principles. Earlier contributions have established that (finitely) anonymous and strongly Paretian quasiorderings exist that agree with axioms of that kind together with weak preference continuity and further consistency. Nevertheless Mariotti and Veneziani ...

The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican?

Philip Pettit (2001) has suggested that there are parallels between his republican account of freedom and Amartya Sen’s (1970) account of freedom as decisive preference. In this paper, I discuss these parallels from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. I sketch a formalization of republican freedom, and argue that republican freedom is formally very similar to freedom as defined in Sen’s “min...

On the Possibility of Continuous, Paretian and Egalitarian Evaluation of Infinite Utility Streams∗

There exists a utilitarian tradition à la Sidgwick of treating equal generations equally in the form of anonymity. Diamond showed that no social evaluation ordering over infinite utility streams satisfying the Pareto principle, Sidgwick’s equity principle, and the axiom of continuity exists. We introduce two versions of egalitarianism in the spirit of the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle and the...

The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal: Reply

Treading a Fine Line: Characterisations and Impossibilities for Liberal Principles in Innitely-Lived Societies1

This paper extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by Mariotti and Veneziani (2009a) to in…nitely-lived societies. First, some novel characterisations of inegalitarian leximax social welfare relations are derived based on the Individual Bene…t Principle (IBP), which incorporates a liberal, non-interfering view of society. This is surprising because the IBP ...