Spurious Unanimity and the Pareto Principle

Economics and Philosophy 32 (3):511-532 (2016)
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Abstract

The Pareto principle states that if the members of society express the same preference judgment between two options, this judgment is compelling for society. A building block of normative economics and social choice theory, and often borrowed by contemporary political philosophy, the principle has rarely been subjected to philosophical criticism. The paper objects to it on the ground that it indifferently applies to those cases in which the individuals agree on both their expressed preferences and their reasons for entertaining them, and those cases in which they agree on their expressed preferences, while differing on their reasons. The latter are cases of "spurious unanimity", and it is normatively inappropriate, or so the paper argues, to defend unanimity preservation at the social level for them, so the Pareto principle is formulated much too broadly. The objection seems especially powerful when the principle is applied in an ex ante context of uncertainty, in which individuals can disagree on both their probabilities and utilities, and nonetheless agree on their preferences over prospects.

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Author's Profile

Philippe Mongin
Last affiliation: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

References found in this work

The Foundations of Statistics.Leonard J. Savage - 1956 - Philosophy of Science 23 (2):166-166.
Social Choice and Individual Values.Irving M. Copi - 1952 - Science and Society 16 (2):181-181.
Utilitarianism and welfarism.Amartya Sen - 1979 - Journal of Philosophy 76 (9):463-489.
Social Choice and Individual Values.Kenneth Joseph Arrow - 1951 - New York, NY, USA: Wiley: New York.

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