Limited Rights and Social Choice Rules

Abstract. In 1970 Amartya Sen introduced within social choice theory the notion of minimal liberty and proved an impossibility result concerning social decision functions. In this paper, Sen’s condition of (minimal) liberty is weakened within the framework of social choice rules. It is then shown that the same kind of impossibility obtains for social choice functions. 1. introduction The origin of the tremendous development of studies on rights and freedom within so-cial choice theory and normative economics can be traced back to the famous short paper of Amartya Sen published in 1970 (Sen 1970; see also his book published the same year (1970a), and Sen (1982, 2002)). In Sen’s paper, it is shown in the framework of aggre-gation procedures that there is a conflict between collective rationality imbedded in the notion of social decision function (in terms of a transitivity-type of the social preference property—in fact, acyclicity of the asymmetric part of the social preference), Paretianism (a unanimity property) and some slight violation of neutrality (neutrality meaning that the names of options or social states are not to be taken into account) possibly combined with some slightly unequal distribution of power among individuals interpreted as an indi-vidual liberty property. Although, since then, rights have been considered within another