Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- 195 Sandel, Michael
- 196 Scanlon, T. M.
- 197 Self-interest
- 198 Self-respect
- 199 Sen, Amartya
- 200 Sense of justice
- 201 Sidgwick, Henry
- 202 Sin
- 203 Social choice theory
- 204 Social contract
- 205 Social minimum
- 206 Social union
- 207 Socialism
- 208 Society of peoples
- 209 Soper, Philip
- 210 Sovereignty
- 211 Stability
- 212 Statesman and duty of statesmanship
- 213 Strains of commitment
- 214 Supreme Court and judicial review
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
203 - Social choice theory
from S
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- 195 Sandel, Michael
- 196 Scanlon, T. M.
- 197 Self-interest
- 198 Self-respect
- 199 Sen, Amartya
- 200 Sense of justice
- 201 Sidgwick, Henry
- 202 Sin
- 203 Social choice theory
- 204 Social contract
- 205 Social minimum
- 206 Social union
- 207 Socialism
- 208 Society of peoples
- 209 Soper, Philip
- 210 Sovereignty
- 211 Stability
- 212 Statesman and duty of statesmanship
- 213 Strains of commitment
- 214 Supreme Court and judicial review
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Social choice theory is a formal analysis of collective decision-making rules, which construct a consistent social ranking of a set of alternatives on the basis of individual preferences over this set. Modern social choice theory begins with Kenneth J. Arrow’s impossibility theorem. According to Arrow’s theorem, there exists no collective decision-making rule that simultaneously satisfies four seemingly uncontroversial conditions; (1) unrestricted domain (a collective decision-making rule can take all logically possible orderings as its domain); (2) Pareto (if all individuals strictly prefer alternative x to y, then society would rank x above y); (3) independence of irrelevant alternatives (the social ranking of two alternatives depends only on individuals’ preferences over these two alternatives); and (4) nondictatorship (the social ranking does not coincide with the ranking of an identified individual, whatever others may rank). This theorem is understood as a generalization of Condorcet’s voting paradox (the majority rule may yield cyclical ranking of three alternatives). Arrow’s theorem provoked the large body of work on axiomatic analysis of distributive principles, including Rawls’s difference principle.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon , pp. 779 - 780Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014