Freedom of choice: John Stuart Mill and the tree of life
Fecha
2012Versión
Acceso abierto / Sarbide irekia
Tipo
Artículo / Artikulua
Versión
Versión publicada / Argitaratu den bertsioa
Identificador del proyecto
Impacto
|
10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8
Resumen
This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John StuartMill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage of choice, but in the ordered collection of choices ...
[++]
This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John StuartMill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage of choice, but in the ordered collection of choices that a person can make in her life.We then suggest to represent a life in a tree structure, where each node
represents a state of life and the edges between nodes will represent possible decisions in life. In this new framework, we propose a set of axioms that imply the following family of measures of lifetime’s freedom of choice: the lifetime’s freedom of choice has to be evaluated by a weighted sum of all possible states of life an individual might visit, with weights representing the number of decisions the individual took to reach that state. [--]
Materias
Freedom of choice,
Tree of life,
Autonomy
Editor
Springer-Verlag
Publicado en
SERIEs, March 2012, Volume 3, Issue 1-2, pp 209-226
Departamento
Universidad Pública de Navarra. Departamento de Economía /
Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa. Ekonomia Saila
Versión del editor
Entidades Financiadoras
Financial support
from the Spanish Ministry of Education through grants ECO2008-04756, ECO2009-11213, ECO2009-
12836, Ramon y Cajal program, FEDER, and the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA is gratefully
acknowledged.