ABSTRACT
The aim of the contribution by N.Gravel, J.F.Laslier and A.Trannoy is to specify properties that a ranking of opportunity sets in terms of individual freedom of choice would plausibly satisfy. The most obvious feature that distinguishes the authors’ approach from almost all of the existing literature on the modelling of freedom of choice is the use of what is called a ‘social setting’. By this the authors mean a framework in which there is more than one individual involved and in which the ‘states’ to be evaluated are not single opportunity sets but rather profiles of opportunity sets, one set for each individual in the society. The main justification that the authors give for expanding the standard framework in this way is that only such a framework is capable of representing the scarcity constraints under which a society operates. Of course, this raises the question of what role these scarcity constraints play in assessing individual freedom. It is intuitively clear that these constraints do play an important role in determining the total opportunities of a society and the possibilities to distribute them among individuals. However, a priori it is not obvious how scarcity constraints influence the evaluation of individual freedom as such. The key twist of the paper is the particular way in which properties of different opportunity profiles are related to properties of the ranking of individual freedom. The crucial condition here is an assumption called ‘impossibility of unanimous gain from redistribution’ (IUGR). In order to understand its meaning and impact in the present context, an important issue that has to be addressed first is what the precise interpretation of the ranking of individual freedoms should be. Given the ‘social context’ proposed by the authors, one may think of two fundamentally different interpretations. On the first, the ranking may be viewed as an impersonal (or ‘social’) ranking of individual freedom abstracting from any specific characteristic of the person whose
freedom is to be evaluated. Alternatively, the ranking could be viewed as a description of the individuals’ own evaluation of the freedom they enjoy in different situations. Of course, the latter interpretation only fits the particular conception of freedom put forward by the authors if one imposes additional restrictions guaranteeing that the rankings of freedom are the same for all individuals. In the following I will refer to the first interpretation as the impersonal interpretation, and to the latter as the individualistic interpretation. It is important to realize that unlike the impersonal interpretation, which implies an ‘objectivist’ view of freedom, the ‘individualistic’ conception of freedom arguably entails no precommitment with respect to the ‘objectivist/subjectivist’ distinction. The main purpose of this note is to argue that a coherent account of the authors’ approach is only possible under the impersonal interpretation of freedom. This seems to be an important observation since, as I shall also argue, the impersonal interpretation of freedom is even more restrictive than an ‘objectivist’ conception of freedom necessarily has to be.2 Indeed, unlike a general Objectivist conception of freedom, the impersonal interpretation not only neglects the subjective value of opportunities for the chooser but also the (objective) abilities of the chooser to use her opportunities in a certain way. The central claim of this note is thus in brief as follows. Even under an objectivist conception of freedom, given their different abilities, $10,000 to spend on commodity bundles may not give Charles the same amount of freedom as it gives Diana.
