Securing Basic Well-being for All

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of a social choice rule to implement a social policy for “securing basic well-being for all.” For this purpose, the paper introduces a new scheme of social choice, called a social relation function (SRF), which associates to each profile of individual well-being appraisals and each profile of group-evaluations a reflexive and transitive binary relation over the set of social policies. As a part of the domains of SRFs, the available class of group evaluations is constrained by the following three conditions: Basic Well-being Condition, Restricted Monotonicity, and Refrain Condition. Furthermore, two axioms, the non-negative response (NR) and the weak Pareto condition (WP), are introduced as the two basic condititions of SRFs. NR demands giving priority to the evaluations of disadvantage groups, while treating them as formally equal relative to each other. WP requires treating impartially the well-being appraisals of all individuals. In conclusion, this paper shows that, under some reasonable assumptions, there exists a SRF which satisfies NR and WP.