Individual Rights Revisited

TLDR

Sen’s libertarian rights formulation has been debated since his work on the impossibility of a Paretian liberal. The paper aims to clarify conflicting views of individual rights by highlighting key strands in the debate. The authors introduce an alternative game‑form formulation of individual rights and compare its merits to Sen’s. They show via counterexample and reasoning that Sen’s concept is often inconsistent with intuitive rights and misses key categories, and discuss the relative merits of the game‑form alternative. © 1992 The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Abstract

Since Amartya Sen's contribution on the impossibility of a Paretian liberal, his formulation of libertarian rights has been under debate. In this paper, the authors highlight some important strands in this debate, and achieve some conceptual clarification of the different and often incompatible views of individual rights. They demonstrate in terms of a counterexample and general reasoning that Sen's concept can, more often than not, be inconsistent with our intuitive view of rights and fails to capture important categories of rights. An alternative formulation in terms of game form is introduced and its relative merit vis-a-vis Sen's formulation is discussed. Copyright 1992 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.