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Little and Bergson on Arrow's concept of social welfare

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Abstract

The paper revisits a debate regarding Arrow's concept of social welfare that took place shortly after the publication of his book, Social Choice and Individual Values. It is argued that several points made by Little and Bergson in that debate nearly fifty years ago may still be helpful in understanding Arrow's contribution. The paper interprets the aspect of social welfare emphasized by Little and Bergson and the aspect emphasized by Arrow in terms of two distinct phases of decision-making in a liberal democracy.

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Notes

  1. For Arrow, an individual's ‘tastes’ are reflected in his ordering of social states based only on his direct consumption, while the values of an individual are reflected in his ordering of social states that takes into account, in addition to his tastes, his standards of equity, etc.

  2. In referring to the results of a social decision-making mechanism, I shall not make any sharp distinction between the problem of the social choice of a social state or action and the problem of socially ranking the social states or actions. In many contexts, however, this may constitute an important distinction.

  3. For illuminating discussions of the notion of deliberative democracy, see Habermas (1984, 1987, 1996), Bohman (1996), and Elster (1998), among others.

  4. See Hare (1964, 1965) and Sen (1967) for discussions of the nature of value judgments and the role of value criticisms in changing a person’s value judgments. Sen (1970b) and Pattanaik (1971) discuss the structure of value judgments and value criticisms in the specific context of welfare economics.

  5. I am using the notion of a social state in a broad sense here to encompass a description of institutional features that reflect the structure of rights, liberties, and procedural fairness. See Pattanaik and Suzumura (1996) for a discussion of alternative interpretations of the notion of a social state.

  6. See, however, Mongin’s (2002) recent discussion of Little (1952).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my student, Ken Sunderland, whose probing questions led me to think about the issues discussed in this paper. An earlier version of the paper was presented in the Conference on the History of Social Choice Theory (Caen, 2002), and the meeting of the Public Choice Society (Nashville, 2003). For helpful comments, I would like to thank K. J. Arrow, C. R. Barrett, S. Barbera, X. Cheng, M. Fleurbaey, S. Kolm, M. Salles, K. Suzumura, and Y. Xu.

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  1. University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA

    Prasanta K. Pattanaik

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  1. Prasanta K. Pattanaik
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Correspondence to Prasanta K. Pattanaik.

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Pattanaik, P.K. Little and Bergson on Arrow's concept of social welfare. Soc Choice Welfare 25, 369–379 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-005-0009-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-005-0009-7

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