The paper explores the notion of freedom of choice which is of considerable importance in welfare economics and the theory of social choice. Three plausible axioms are introduced for ranking alternative opportunity sets in terms of the degrees of freedom that they offer to the agent making choices. It is shown that, under these axioms, judgements about degrees of freedom of choice have to be based on the naive principle of simply counting the number of available options.

This essay explores Sen’s claim that rights-realization can be consequentially evaluated. Supporting this claim, it attempts to show that the value pluralism thereby presupposed is sufficient to render superfluous the idea — advanced by Sen and others — of ‘agent-relativity’ as a structural feature of ethical judgment.

This paper analyzes the optimal allocation of a given antipoverty budget consistent with various usual measures of poverty. It is shown that it is generally optimal to give all the budget either to the poorest or to the richest of the poor. It is only with the Sen index of poverty that it is sometimes optimal to combine both types of allocation. This property may be related to the normalization rule used in the derivation of that measure and sheds some new light on the axiomatics of poverty measurement.

We try to operationalise Sen’s concept of the living standard using questionnaire data on the economic situation of the Belgian unemployed. We use factor analysis to reduce the number of basic functionings and to avoid possible overlap between them. The factors obtained can be interpreted in a natural and transparent way : they refer to social isolation, general feeling of happiness, physical functioning, microsocial contact, degree of activity and financial situation. Factor scores on these functionings are related in a meaningful way to the socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents.

The editors of this journal have kindly offered me the opportunity to write a “reply” to the essays included in this special number. It is not easy to respond adequately to such a rich collection of challenging ideas and contributions, nor to hide the fact that I am delighted — and feel tremendously honoured — by the occasion and by this wonderful set of essays. The papers cover a wide variety of fields : social choice theory and welfare economics (Blackorby, Donaldson and Weymark; Moulin); bargaining theory and social choice (Roemer); social justice and equality (Cohen; Van Parijs); evaluation of freedom (Pattanaik and Xu); rights and consequentialism (Steiner); evaluation of poverty (Bourguignon and Fields); standards of living (Schokkaert and Van Ootegem). I shall follow the authors from territory to territory, like a solitary “groupie”. But I shall also crane my neck in trying to view one territory from another, to explore some interconnections.