Serge Kolm's "epistemic counterfactual principle" says that a social choice only needs to be made from the actual feasible set of alternatives given the actual preference profile, but it must be justified by the choices that would have been made in appropriate counterfactual choice situations. Kolm's principle does not identify the relevant counterfactuals. In this article, it is argued that the appropriate counterfactuals to justify an impartial social choice are all of the choice situations that a moral agent behind a veil of ignorance might think is the actual choice situation outside the veil.
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Paper provided by Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University in its series Working Papers with number
0518.
Find related papers by JEL classification: B40 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - General D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Mongin, P & d'Aspremont, C, 1996.
"Utility Theory and Ethics,"
Papers
9632, Paris X - Nanterre, U.F.R. de Sc. Ec. Gest. Maths Infor..
Other versions:
MONGINÊ, Philippe & dÊASPREMONT, Claude, 1996.
"Utility theory and ethics,"
CORE Discussion Papers
1996063, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).