Freedom of choice: John Stuart Mill and the tree of life

• Jorge Alcalde-Unzu ^[1] ; Miguel A. Ballester ^[2] ; Jorge Nieto ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Navarra

     Universidad de Navarra

     Pamplona, España

     
  2. [2] Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

     Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

     Barcelona, España

     
• Localización: SERIEs : Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, ISSN 1869-4195, Vol. 3, Nº. 1-2, 2012 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Salvador Barberà), págs. 209-226
• Idioma: inglés
• DOI: 10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8
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• 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 Stuart Mill, 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.