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arXiv · 1903.07769

J. S. Mill's Liberal Principle and Unanimity

Edward J. Green
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Abstract

The broad concept of an individual's welfare is actually a cluster of related specific concepts that bear a "family resemblance" to one another. One might care about how a policy will affect people both in terms of their subjective preferences and also in terms of some notion of their objective interests. This paper provides a framework for evaluation of policies in terms of welfare criteria that combine these two considerations. Sufficient conditions are provided for such a criterion to imply the same ranking of social states as does Pareto's unanimity criterion. Sufficiency is proved via study of a community of agents with interdependent ordinal preferences.

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Edward J. Green. 2019-03-18. J. S. Mill's Liberal Principle and Unanimity. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.07769

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