Liberal Paradox Research Articles

What to Make of the Liberal Paradox

Sen's Liberal Paradox has received a good deal of attention in the literature. However, it is worth re-opening the discussion since the solutions offered so far have serious problems and since there is more to say about the nature of the problem displayed by the Liberal Paradox. I propose a new solution to the paradox in the following sense: First, I argue that its range of applicability is not very broad. Second, there is nothing paradoxical about a conflict of the principles involved in the Liberal Paradox. (Nagel's thesis of the ``fragmentation of value'' is important to make this point.) Third, I make a recommendation about how to remove conflicts when they occur in a restricted class of cases. For the other cases, no recommendation of similar appeal is available. But in the light of the first point, the availability of a generally applicable recommendation was not to be expected.

The Paradoxes of Kennedy Liberalism

The members of John F. Kennedy's presidential administration and American social scientists were inordinately fond of one another. There was an implicit faith among Kennedy liberals that American social scientists had mastered knowledge about the real world and that the knowledge of the past--mere "conventional wisdom" in John Kenneth Galbraith's scornful words--could be replaced by the latest analysis to cure any and all intractable human miseries. For every problem and each endeavor, Kennedy reached toward university professors and research specialists. For their part, those practical thinkers who were called upon were eager to share their work. Like the bespectacled milquetoast who finally gets a chance to prove himself, they scurried off to Washington, gushing praise for the new president.

NEGATIVE FREEDOM AND THE LIBERAL PARADOXES

In their game-theoretic formulations, the liberal paradoxes of Amartya Sen and Alan Gibbard show a tension between freedom on the one hand, and Pareto optimality and stability on the other. This article examines what happens to the liberal paradoxes if a negative conception of freedom is used. Given a game-theoretic definition of negative freedom, it is shown, first, that the liberal paradoxes disappear in this new context: there are game forms in which individuals have a minimal amount of negative freedom and which guarantee the existence of Pareto-optimal and stable outcomes. Furthermore, if a game form gives each individual a maximal amount of negative freedom, the Pareto optimality of each stable outcome of the corresponding game is guaranteed. However, many games that provide such maximal negative freedom do not contain stable outcomes. We show that the liberal paradox may reappear in the mixed extension of such games.

Still on Holidays Hank? --

There's something of an unspoken tendency in the field of conversation analysis to conflate the notion of 'conversation' with that of 'all forms of talk'.1 Hence the very positive efforts in the field to try to find the mechanisms behind what people do when they talk together, whenever they talk together, whoever they may happen to be, whatever the topic, whatever the type of talk. To stress: this is absolutely admirable and a great advance on, to name a few, social semiotics, speech-act theory and formal pragmatics. But is it possible that the various types of talk that we can find inside single conversations may be interesting and significant, not just for analysts but also for those who, as we hope to show, manifestly orient to generic changes within the conversations they are co-constructing?

Social Choice and Individual Liberties

Sen's characterization of an essential feature of libertarianism is examined and found fatally flawed. The impossibility of a Paretian liberal (Sen (1970)) follows from putting an existential claim, Condition L, to a universal test. The failure to specify those elements for which Condition L is true leads to a series of logical errors culminating in the Paretian epidemic (Sen (1976)). Decisive liberties co-exist because they pertain to choices that are not mutually exclusive. Indecisive liberties co-exist through mutual consent. The liberal partition limits the scope of personal liberties to personal choices.

On Sen's Liberal Paradox and its Reception within Political Theory and Welfare Economics

In this article, Amartya Sen's seminal proof of the impossibility of a Paretian liberal is briefly reviewed. I then discuss the reception of this alleged ‘liberal paradox’ within the fields of political theory and welfare economics. In particular, I examine the criticisms made by Brian Barry, and their wider implications for the field of social choice theory. It is argued that the various criticisms made on Sen's characterisation of liberty are fundamental, and that Sen's subsequent defence of his position is unconvincing. Moreover, there remain some wider doubts as to the usefulness of social choice theory's SWF approach to individual rights and freedoms.

"I Was Tellin It": Race, Gender, and the Puzzle of the Storyteller

Race, Gender, and the Puzzle of the Storyteller I'd like to thank Drew Faust for taking on what still seems in some quarters to be an unpopular project: applying actual thought to popular literature. Between Faulkner and Mitchell, scholars have chosen Faulkner. Few have taken Gone with the Wind seriously enough to write about it. It's not anthologized, either. Of the southern literature anthologies I've seen, the only one to include a portion of, or even mention of, Gone with the Wind, is the Oxford Book of the American South, whose senior editor, Ed Ayers, is a historian.(1) Certainly one of the reasons for this critical and anthological neglect is the sheer size of the 1037-page book. Another must be the flapping of the last tatters of the old boundary dividing high literature, demanding study, from popular literature, which a true scholar would not even stoop to read. A third reason is the subject of Faust's talk: the knee-jerk racism evident in both what the book makes of black characters and what it omits. This last reason was critical a few years ago in the editorial board's decision to leave Gone with the Wind out of the Heath Anthology of American Literature. I was at that meeting and well remember the passion with which African American editors articulated their repugnance to and fear of what they saw as a novel that not only represented racism, but could actively construct racism in its readers. One of the earliest literary scholars to write seriously about this putatively unserious novel was Louis D. Rubin Jr., who considered some implications of the same-year publication of Margaret Mitchell's award-winning Gone with the Wind and William Faulkner's relatively obscure Absalom, Absalom!.(2) Since then, feminists--myself included--have taken up the questions posed by and in this novel (for example, IS tomorrow another day?) to focus on its repetitive and revisionary renderings of gender constructions. Is Scarlett a New Woman or--in Jason Compson's words--just another Bitch? Is Rhett a Closet Southern Gentleman, or just another garden-variety rapist? Is Margaret Mitchell a southern Betty Friedan? Or a southern Phyllis Schlafly? Faust has taken the important step of extending these questions beyond the racial boundaries set by the novel itself and by much of the thinking about it. She has asked, rightfully, how Mitchell's representations of race work in the novel, and how those representations impinge upon Mitchell's work with gender. Faust has, rightfully, joined at the hip two categories of analysis: race and gender. Her conclusion, her thesis, as I understand it, is the following: Although she was working in a tradition of women who used the Civil War in their writing to question the boundaries of southern womanhood, Margaret Mitchell had to curtail her experiments with gender when she hit the brick wall of racism. To imagine freedom for a white woman necessarily and logically requires imagining freedom for anyone, even black people, even black men. Freedom does not respect categories of race and gender. Yet, in Faust's view, Mitchell could not allow herself to imagine past her traditional white southern stereotypes of African Americans. As a result, she faltered and failed in her imagination of Scarlett's liberation. She and her protagonist end by clutching the very chains that bind them to the past, the chains of southern racism. There is a lot to be said for Faust's claim. Feminist thinkers since Simone Beauvoir, and American women's historians at least since Nancy Cott, have written about the paradoxical bonds of womanhood, though for Cott and Beauvoir the chains that bind have more to do with love and marriage than with racism. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston has Nanny describe loving men as de very prong all us black women gits hung on. Dis love!(3) Sleeping with the enemy may be the more familiar paradox of women's liberation, but dwelling on the differences among women, such as the racial divide, is in many ways the more interesting one. …

Privacy as a planning problem: Some transport‐related examples

There are potential but unwanted privacy‐invading elements inherent in modern transport surveillance technology, and we have no satisfactory decision rules to resolve the value conflicts that the use of this technology might create. The practical examples of transportation planning instruments eroding privacy deal with toll technology and intelligent vehicle‐highway systems. The theoretical part shows how such technology, by violating privacy‐rights, can cause the liberal paradox of social choice to arise in transportation planning. Liberalism is taken to grant each individual the right to decide within a protected sphere. Amartya Sen has proved that such liberalism cannot be guaranteed, given the combination of preference sovereignty and rational social decision‐making. Privacy‐rights contribute to the establishment of protected spheres. When the collective meddles with decisions in protected spheres, the Pareto principle and privacy‐rights may conflict and thereby cause the liberal paradox.

Planning and the Liberal Paradox: A Democratic Dilemma in Social Choice

Planning theory and social choice theory are merged to shed light on a liberal paradox. The theorem stating the impossibility of a Paretian liberal says that a cycle-free collective decision procedure cannot be guaranteed with liberalism and preference sovereignty. Liberalism grants each individual some right to decide within his or her personal sphere, and preference sovereignty means that the Pareto principle is respected. It may be impossible to design procedures for planning and decision making simultaneously realizing the values of rationality, individual liberty, and the public interest. In light of social choice theory, the article examines whether the well-known modes of planning prescribe practices serving to alleviate this conflict or causing it to arise lessfrequently. The author concludes that several modes (e.g., disjointed incrementalism, critical pragmatism) hold such properties and shows how communicative planning helps to circumvent Sen's liberal paradox.

Game Forms, Rights, and the Efficiency of Social Outcomes

We consider Sen's familiar paradox of the Paretian liberal in a framework where individual rights are represented as a game form. We distinguish the different senses in which one can think of the problem of an inconsistency between the Pareto criterion and the existence of individual rights. Conditions, in terms of properties of the relevant game form, are given for such inconsistency to arise under different notions of game theoretic equilibria.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: D71.

`Quality of Life' Talk: The Liberal Paradox of Psychological Testing

The new discourse of `quality of life' is highly consequential for those whose lives are regulated by medical and psychological services, but at the heart of it there is a paradox. On the one hand, psychologists are committed to assessing the wellbeing of their clients; on the other hand, their theorization of `quality of life' and their diagnostic interview procedures cordon off its official definition from ordinary usages. This paper explores how interviewers try to solve the paradox by `naturalizing' their questioning, in spite of interviewees' orientation to the clinical test that motivates it. We pay close attention to the actual practice of assessment interviews and show how troubles arise due to mismatches between the `natural' and the official in two crucial aspects: the motivation for asking about someone's quality of life and how to deal with the `irrelevant' material and troubles talk that the client might provide as an answer. We show how interviewers use cover identifications, pro-verbs and prodescriptions to solve the paradox they face. We conclude that whatever such interviews achieve, it is not so much a record of the respondent's quality of life but of the interviewer and interviewee's joint management of a paradoxical encounter.

Das Paradox des Liberalismus - eine Einführung

Abstract This is a somewhat simplistic introduction to some of the topics related to the so called ‘paradox of liberalism’. It tries to serve the twin purpose of facilitating access to the papers printed in this issue of Analyse & Kritik and putting them into a broader perspective.

The Paretian Liberal, His Liberties and His Contracts

Abstract The paper tries to relate classical liberal intuitions about rights and liberties to some of the more formal discussions of the putative impossibility of a Paretian liberal. Its focus is on the interpretation of formal modelling rather than on formal analysis. The theoretical concepts of the formalized approaches more often than not distort the meaning of the non-formalized concepts of classical liberal theory. Using proper explications of the concepts of liberties and rights respectively the alleged paradoxes of liberalism lose their paradoxical character.

The Liberal Paradox

Abstract The paper seeks to interpret the liberal paradox in a framework where individual rights are represented as game forms. Several close counterparts, in this framework, of Sen’s theorem are considered, and their intuitive significance is discussed.

Rights: Formulation and Consequences

Abstract The symposium included in this issue of Analyse & Kritik has provided an excellent occasion to re-examine formal as well as motivational issues underlying the so-called liberal paradox. This rejoinder discusses the significance of the new results and analyses, their bearing on the formulation and implications of rights, and also corrects a misinterpretation. Reflections precipitated by the liberal paradox can influence the acceptability of different principles of social decisions, and also the interpretation of ‘preference’ and ‘unanimity’. They also point to some concerns that are relevant in the formation of individual preferences in a society with interdependent lives.

Individual Rights and Legal Validity

Abstract The condition of liberty which Sen used in his famous theorem on the impossibility of the Paretian liberal was defined in terms of individual preferences. The preference-based approach has been the subject of much criticism, which led to the evolution of the game-theoretic analysis of rights. In this approach no references to individual preferences are made. Two questions are examined in this paper: how can different types of right be distinguished within a game-theoretic setting, and how do rights come into existence? These questions are addressed on the basis of ideas originating from legal theory. The discussion shows that an analysis of rights should take account of the whole legal system of which a legal norm forms part. Furthermore, it reveals that preferences should be re-introduced into the formal study of individual rights.

Welfare, Rights, and Social Choice Procedure: A Perspective

Abstract Sen’s “The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal” was meant to crystallize his fundamental criticism against the welfaristic basis of welfare economics in general, and social choice theory in particular. This paper vindicates Sen’s criticism, arguing that its logical relevance is not lost in light of recent criticisms against his method of articulating individual rights in terms of a person’s decisive power in social choice. We show that some recent proposals that Sen’s articulation failed to capture a strong libertarian tradition of free contract and that an appropriate formulation of this tradition wipes off the Sen impossibility cannot be sustained. We then show that the game form articulation of rights casts serious doubts on the Sen articulation of liberty, but the Sen impossibility strenuously comes back in the context of realizing conferred game form rights as well as in the context of initial conferment of game form rights.

Constitutional and Liberal Rights

Abstract Amartya Sen has demonstrated a possible inconsistency between a (liberal) right and Pareto optimality. Neither Sen nor the subsequent literature have discussed the origin of the rights that lead to the liberal paradox. In this article I examine one possible origin of rights definitions-a constitutional contract agreed to by all members of the community. Constitutional rights are show to be vulnerable to a similar paradox as with liberal rights, but if the writers of the constitution were correct in their choice of actions to protect, such paradoxes will be unlikely and involve small welfare losses when they do occur. The article demonstrates that both the origin of rights and their potential role in advancing the interests of citizens can be explained using a utilitarian/welfarist methodology.

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL EVALUATION: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The authors propose a framework for the analysis of social choice and welfare which uses the informational basis of individual preference orderings over the pairs of conventionally defined social alternatives and social decision-making mechanisms. In particular, they consider the case where the decision-making mechanism is a rights-structure modeled as game forms. The authors use this framework to clarify the role for individual preferences in conferring rights, in the realization of the conferred rights, and in describing the formal contents of rights. They also explore its implications for the controversial issue of the consistency of social choice and A. K. Sen's paradox of Paretian libertarianism. Copyright 1996 by Royal Economic Society.

The Paretian Liberal Paradox and ecological economics

Two of the most basic considerations in collective choice are the Pareto principle and some minimal protection of individual rights. In his Impossibility Theorem, Sen (1970) shows that there is a potential inconsistency between preference sovereignty (as expressed by the Pareto condition) and the protection of minimal rights (a liberal or liberty condition). The Paretian Liberal Paradox (PLP), and the extensive debate surrounding it, prompts serious reconsideration of the traditional welfare economics approach. The critique of welfarism made by the PLP is of central importance for environmental issues given pervasive externalities, missing markets, uncertainty, and potential irreversibilities. Making collective choice decisions on these issues may require using explicit “non-utility” information and restricting individual preference sovereignty. We explore the implications of the PLP for long-term environmental policy and the transdisciplinary field of ecological economics. As a simple pedagogical device relying on sparse principles, the PLP stimulates an increased awareness of the potential conflict between preferences and rights. Recognition of the PLP focuses attention on what counts as admissible information in collective choice rules. For example, consideration of the PLP illuminates differences in the informational requirements of alternative sustainability concepts.