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8 - Reasoning with preferences?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2010

By
John Broome
Edited by
Reiko Gotoh  and
Paul Dumouchel
Reiko Gotoh
Affiliation:
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
Paul Dumouchel
Affiliation:
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
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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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Against Injustice
The New Economics of Amartya Sen
 , pp. 161 - 186
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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