Generalized rawlsianism

This paper proposes and characterizes a family of social choice rules, including maximin and leximin, by considering only ordinal social choice in the sense that individual utilities are ordinally measurable and ordinally comparable. This family of rules, called generalized Rawlsianism, provides a unified approach for dealing with different informational constraints on ordinal interpersonal comparisons. Rank noncomparability, which states that individual utilities under the same social ranking should always be interpersonally noncomparable, is then proposed as a new basic invariance axiom. We show that a social welfare ordering with super domain is a generalized rank hierarchy if and only if it satisfies anonymity, nonnullity, full rank noncomparability, and the Pareto monotonicity principle; together with the Pigou–Dalton principle, generalized Rawlsianism can then be fully characterized. Our characterizations depend heavily on the result that a social welfare ordering with super domain is a generalized hierarchy if and only if it satisfies nonnullity, interpersonal noncomparability, and the Pareto monotonicity principle.