Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I
- Part II
- 4 The power of a democratic public
- 5 The challenge of gender justice
- 6 Gift, market, and social justice
- 7 Justice and public reciprocity
- 8 Reasoning with preferences?
- 9 Conceptions of individual rights and freedom in welfare economics: a re-examination
- Part III
- 13 Part IV
- Index
- References
8 - Reasoning with preferences?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2010
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I
- Part II
- 4 The power of a democratic public
- 5 The challenge of gender justice
- 6 Gift, market, and social justice
- 7 Justice and public reciprocity
- 8 Reasoning with preferences?
- 9 Conceptions of individual rights and freedom in welfare economics: a re-examination
- Part III
- 13 Part IV
- Index
- References
Summary
Reasoning and requirements of rationality
Preferences lie at the heart of economic theory. Amartya Sen's work, starting with his remarkable book Collective Choice and Social Welfare, has taken the formal study of preferences to a new level of sophistication. Sen has exposed many of the standard presumptions of economics to careful criticism. Economists generally take it for granted that the preferences of rational people satisfy various formal conditions – transitivity is the most prominent of them. Sen has examined each of these conditions, and asked whether the preferences of a rational person must indeed satisfy them.
This paper approaches the formal properties of rational preferences from a different direction. It does not directly ask what conditions, if any, a rational person's preferences must satisfy. Instead, it asks how a rational person could bring her preferences to satisfy those conditions, whatever they may be. Suppose for example that rational preferences must be transitive; then this paper looks for a process through which a person may come to make her preferences transitive.
If there is such a process, it will be reasoning; I am looking for a process of reasoning with preferences. This investigation supports Sen's program indirectly. If some condition is genuinely required by rationality, one would expect there to be some way in which a rational person could bring herself to satisfy it. If there is no such way to satisfy it, that suggests the condition may not be required by rationality after all.
Information
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- Information
- Against InjusticeThe New Economics of Amartya Sen, pp. 161 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
References
2005. ‘Does rationality give us reasons?’, Philosophical Issues, 15 (1): 321–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2001. Aspects of Reason (with an introduction by Richard Warner), Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(ed.) 2006. Preferences and Well-Being (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 81), Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
2006. ‘Preference, deliberation and satisfaction’, in (ed.), Preferences and Well-Being, pp. 131–54.
2006. ‘Content-related and attitude-related reasons for preferences’, in (ed.), Preferences and Well-Being, pp. 155–82.
2000. ‘Money pump with foresight’, in (ed.), Imperceptible Harms and Benefits, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 123–54.Google Scholar
1973. ‘Deciding to believe’, in his Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press, pp. 136–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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