Not all Judgment Aggregation Should be Neutral

Judgment aggregation is concerned with the problem of aggregating individual views on logically related issues. It offers a general framework in which several different types of aggregation problems can be represented and studied. Furthermore, judgment aggregation can be applied to problems that consider together issues that are typically considered as separate aggregation problems. E.g., judgment aggregation can be used to determine group goals and collectively advanced supporting beliefs. While goals can be seen as preferences, typically studied by preference aggregation, beliefs cannot. Neutrality of a judgment aggregation rule is the property of aggregating the views on all issues in the same manner and it is uniformly considered to be a desirable property. This paper defends the position that multi issue type aggregation problems may require non-neutral judgment aggregation rules, and proposes a method for developing such rules.