On the Consistency of Libertarian Claims
On the Consistency of Libertarian Claims
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论自由主义主张的一致性
DOI：
10.2307/2297347
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发表时间：
1978
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
K. Suzumura
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
K. Suzumura
If one social state is unanimously preferred to another, it is difficult to argue that the former state should not be socially chosen over the latter and, as a result, the claim that the collective choice rule we are interested in should be Pareto-inclusive has seldom been challenged. It may also be claimed that there are certain matters which are purely personal and our collective choice rule should be so designed that each person is empowered to decide what should be socially chosen, no matter what others may think, in choices over his personal matters. Sen [8] has shown that these two principles conflict, namely, there exists no Pareto-inclusive collective choice rule (with an unrestricted applicability) satisfying a mild libertarian claim. Since the logical correctness of Sen's argument is beyond any doubt, we are forced to weaken either the Pareto rule or the libertarian claim in order to avoid this difficulty, unless we renounce the general applicability of our collective choice procedure. Although many subsequent contributions have modified libertarian claims in favour of the Pareto rule, one of the lessons Sen [8 and 9] has drawn from his Paradox of a Paretian Liberal is that a mechanical use of the Pareto rule (irrespective of the motivation behind people's preferences) seems unsound. In line with this observation, Sen [10, Section XI] has recently proposed a resolution of this paradox which restricts the use of the Pareto rule. We will succinctly reconstruct his resolution with some clarifications of the structure of his rightsassignment (in Section 2) and then show (in Section 3) that one of the Gibbard's paradoxes [4, Section 3] can be solved by essentially the same line of argument. This might be of some importance, because Sen's paradox and that of Gibbard are essentially different in nature. Suffice it to quote a passage from Gibbard [4, p. 394]: " [Sen's libertarianism] guarantees each person a special voice on only one pair of alternatives, but the special voice is a strong one: the alternative he prefers is to be preferable, no matter what his other preferences. [Gibbard's libertarianism] guarantees each person a special voice on many pairs of alternatives . . . but the voice is limited. The one he prefers is to be preferable if indeed he prefers its distinguishing feature unconditionally; otherwise his preference may be overridden." In Section 4, we will examine the possibility of introducing information on interpersonal welfare comparisons into the cdnceptual framework. It will be shown that, if the rights-exercising is restricted by the Rawlsian maximin justice consideration (which is now available to us by the stronger informational basis we are working on), the modified libertarian claim is made compatible with the Pareto principle. This is in sharp contrast with Sen's [10, p. 228] assertion that " for this class of impossibility results, introducing interpersonal comparisons is not much of a cure (in contrast with the impossibility results of the Arrow type) ", which he has drawn from Kelly's [6] Impossibility of a Just Liberal. In Section 5, we will briefly summarize our conclusions. Some basic concepts and lemmas are put forward in the Appendix at the end of the paper.
