Individual Liberalism in a Paretian Society

There are many different notions of liberalism,' but the concept that Sen wishes to capture is that over certain personal alternatives an individual should satisfy his own preferences. For example, the impossibility of a Paretian liberal is illustrated by considering, for each of two individuals in a society, freedom of choice to read a book or not.2 Sen's liberalism is a condition on social choice. Here, in contrast, we examine the consequences of restricting individual preferences to be liberal, in the spirit of Sen's (1970) conclusion that "the ultimate guarantee for individual liberty may rest not on rules for social choice but on developing individual values that respect each other's personal choice." An individual is liberal if, over alternatives which are "none of his business," his preferences recognize the sovereignty of the individual to whom the alternatives are personal. This does not exclude the possibility of preference over the choice that might be made by another, for "I prefer you to decide for yourself whether to read the book or not, but would rather you decide not to" is apparently neither an inconsistent nor an illiberal statement. In this case the preferences are dependent on another's preferences. If this relation is reciprocated also, we shall say that the individuals have interdependent preferences. The relevance of these remarks is borne out by an examination of Sen's impossibility theorem. There are two individuals, prude and lascivious, and three alternatives; (a) that prude reads the book, (b) that lascivious reads it, and (c) that nobody reads it. Prude's preferences are cPaPb, since he would rather that nobody read the book; while given that one of them must, he would like to save susceptible lascivious from reading it. Lascivious's preferences are aPbPc. He wants one of them to read the book, but is prepared to sacrifice his own pleasure in order to educate reactionary prude.