ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Amartya Sen’s scepticism towards an understanding of rationality in terms of the internal consistency of choice. Sen has returned to his criticisms of viewing rationality in these terms many times, the most being Sen, and his consistency in pursuing these criticisms almost suffices to make him a paragon of the theory he is criticizing. The chapter analyses Sen’s criticism of the concept of preference as it is understood in economic theory and explains why Sen thinks the dual relationship in which preference is embroiled overburdens the concept. The debate surrounding internal consistency is independent of questions regarding motivation, for, as Sen writes, a ‘consistent chooser can have any degree of egoism that we care to specify’. Sen continues, each player in the case at hand ‘is assumed to be self-centred and interested basically only in his own prison term’.
