Rights, welfarism, and social choice

The purpose of this paper is to outline a formal analytical framework that can accommodate considerations of individual rights as well as the more familiar ethical concerns of conventional welfare economics. The failure to accommodate such fundamental values as rights has been at the heart of Amartya K. Sen's (1979) criticism of welfarism which is inherent in much of welfare economics and social-choice theory. However, the roots of the problem seem to lie quite deep. Even if one discards neutrality and similar properties which are regarded as capturing the essence of welfarism, the very concept of a social-decision function itself, so widely used in socialchoice theory, turns out to be too restrictive a vehicle for articulating our intuition about rights. We propose an extension of the standard framework of social-choice theory, which can overcome some of these difficulties and enables us to discuss individual rights and other social values in one integrated framework.