THE POSSIBILITY OF SOCIAL CHOICE

Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1998 by Amartya Sen.

An abstract by Greta Spineti.

In this Nobel lecture, Amartya Sen deals with the several issues in aggregating together and
analysing social judgements, group decisions and the preferences and concerns of their different
constituents. Sen mainly approaches the social choice theory to evaluate the main areas of the
welfare economics, i.e. social choice, distribution and poverty.
The author traced back the origins of this challenging subject around the time of the French
Revolution, and more in general, during the European Enlightenment, a period characterized by a
strong pursuit of stability and rationality in sciences, history as well as in social choice: their goal
was to find out a rational and democratic framework to get decisions which could also respect the
preferences of each member of the group. Unfortunately, with scarce results. Only in recent times
this branch of knowledge returned to the scene, thanks to Arrow. With his “impossibility theorem”
he argued that even weak conditions cannot be satisfied at the same time by any known social
choice procedure: the only way to avoid divergence would be to end up in a dictatorship, thus
experiencing a lack of participation and expression of group’s heterogeneity. After Arrow’s work, a
significant literature followed, getting approximately to the same pessimistic results.
On the other hand, the utilitarian approach, which diverges from the social choice theory,
encouraged the use of personal interests in the form of their respective utilities to obtain judgments
about the social interest, thus favouring the utilitarian calculus pioneered by Jeremy Bentham in the
18th century. But, since the main focus was the total utility of a community, without paying attention
to the distribution of that total, this approach resulted in a lack of relevant information. Later in
time, economists, influenced by the “logical positivist” philosophy, claimed that interpersonal
comparisons of utility had no scientific basis since “no common denominator of feelings is possible”
(Robbins, 1938 p. 636) so they ended up in a situation similar to the use of voting information in
making social choice. This belief, Sen argues, was responsible of the reduced informational base on
which social choice had relied on for decades. As a response to the “new welfare economics”
approach, Arrow’s decided to take in consideration apparently weaker conditions (Pareto efficiency,
non-dictatorship, independence and unrestricted domain) and formulate its “social welfare
function”. But, as argued earlier, his impossibility theorem stated that it is not possible to satisfy all
the conditions at the same time, generating a strong pessimism regarding this matter.
At this point, what Sen wants to underline, is the importance of combining the formal and
mathematical techniques of investigation with the informal insights and the real-world concerns.
According to Sen, Arrovian conditions insist too much on the fact that social choice procedures must
work with any possible set of individual preferences, as he only conceives a mathematical, analytical
approach, thus being charged with keeping the distributional issue out of his reasoning. The
economist thus suggests the possibility to integrate interpersonal comparisons of well-being in
social choice procedures by using “invariance conditions”, constructed as “social welfare
functionals”; although this may not be possible in some situations, limited levels of “partial
comparability” are often enough to make social decisions, in fact they can make the difference to
the informational basis of reasoned social judgement. In this way, mild forms of comparability
permit making consistent social welfare judgements while satisfying Arrow’s requirements and
taking into consideration the distributional issue. By overcoming the previous artificial barriers
which ruled interpersonal comparisons out and the consequent informational widening, the
possibilities of practical welfare economics and social choice have been broadened and there’s
finally space for the investigation of several normative measurement through the axiomatic
approach of social welfare analysis. Although he insists on the informational broadening in the form
of interpersonal comparison in order to bypass Arrow’s impossibility theorem, the same approach
could be used, for instance, to solve “the liberal paradox” through an informational enrichment to
better evaluate the feasible priorities between personal liberty and the desire achievement.
In support of his theory, Sen reports some example such as the study of poverty: traditionally,
poverty has always been detected by counting the number of people under a certain income; it is
of course probably the most important aspect, but what about other factors such as personal
heterogeneities and environmental diversities, for instance? What about someone whose income
is above the poverty line but suffers from an illness which requires expensive treatments? The
choice of the informational basis must be strictly linked to pragmatic considerations and
informational availability. The same reasoning can be applied when studying the causation of
famines or the perception of gender inequality.
The main goal of this lecture is to emphasize the existence of constructive social choice theory which
emerges through the pragmatic interpretation of the impossibility results. This is only possible by
widening the informational basis of such choices. The previous pessimist theories derived from a
narrow informational base and requesting an obsessive precision in defining mental comparisons,
which did not allow researchers to understand that partial comparisons can be equally useful for
many purposes.