The impossibility of a Paretian egalitarian

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

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...

The Impossibility of a Paretian Rational: A Bayesian Perspective

If a group takes a collective decision on the basis of separately aggregated group judgments on the probabilities of independent events, there may not exist any anonymous aggregation rule that respects individuals’ unanimous outcome preferences at all profiles of beliefs.

Compensation and Responsibility: General Impossibilities and Possibilities

We consider a compensation problem within a responsible–sensitive egalitarian framework. We show that Arrowvian general impossibility results. However, if information about interpersonal– comparable utilities is available, this impossibility is escapable. We characterize a general class of allocation rules defined by social evaluation functions. As a corollary of our results, we obtain new char...