Abstract
This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John Stuart Mill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage of choice, but in the ordered collection of choices that a person can make in her life. We then suggest to represent a life in a tree structure, where each node represents a state of life and the edges between nodes will represent possible decisions in life. In this new framework, we propose a set of axioms that imply the following family of measures of lifetime’s freedom of choice: the lifetime’s freedom of choice has to be evaluated by a weighted sum of all possible states of life an individual might visit, with weights representing the number of decisions the individual took to reach that state.
Highlights
This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice which is, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society
See Barbera et al (2004) for an extensive survey and a formal description that connects the problem to other relevant economic questions
The question of freedom of choice and its relevance for Economics was already present in Smith (1776), whose most famous book was a close defense of individual freedom as a key instrument for the Wealth of Nations
Summary
This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice which is, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Sen (1988, 1991) established that freedom of choice has two distinct values: intrinsic and instrumental. The latter means that, freedom of choice enables individuals and nations to manage their own capabilities in such a way as to achieve a better outcome, and higher well-being. Freedom of choice has an instrumental value in that, given more opportunities, a person has a better chance of achieving states of life that are closer to her preferences. The intrinsic value of freedom of choice means that, by having freedom to choose from a set of possibilities and by the mere act of choosing, individuals are better-off. The proofs of all the results are given in the Appendix
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