THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF A PARETIAN REPUBLICAN? SOME COMMENTS ON PETTIT AND SEN

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 “minimal liberalism” condition. In consequence, the republican account of freedom is vulnerable to a version of Sen's liberal paradox, an inconsistency between universal domain, freedom, and the weak Pareto principle. I argue that some standard escape routes from the liberal paradox – those via domain restriction – are not easily available to the republican. I suggest that republicans need to take seriously the challenge of the impossibility of a Paretian republican.

EQUAL VALUE OF LIFE AND THE PARETO PRINCIPLE

A principle claiming equal entitlement to continued life has been strongly defended in the literature as a fundamental social value. We refer to this principle as ‘equal value of life'. In this paper we argue that there is a general incompatibility between the equal value of life principle and the weak Pareto principle and provide proof of this under mild structural assumptions. Moreover we demonstrate that a weaker, age-dependent version of the equal value of life principle is also incompatible with the weak Pareto principle. However, both principles can be satisfied if transitivity of social preference is relaxed to quasi-transitivity.