Consequentialist ethics: Evaluates actions, policies, or institutions in regard to the outcomes
they produce.
Deontological ethics: Evaluates the intrinsic value of actions, policies, or institutions in light of
the rights, duties, or obligations of the individuals involved.
Social Choice Theory: addresses the voting rules that govern and describe how individual
preferences are aggregated to form a collective group preference. Much of this is highly
mathematical.
A round-robin tournament pits each competing alternative against every other alternative an
equal number of times in a series of pair-wise votes.
- “pair-wise votes”
- Winner is whoever wins the most contests
An actor is said to be rational if she possesses a complete and transitive preference ordering
over a set of outcomes.
An actor has complete preference ordering if she can compare each pair of elements (e.g., x
and y) in a set of feasible outcomes in one of the following ways:
Actor prefers x to y
She prefers y to x
She is indifferent between x and y
An actor has transitive preference ordering if for any x, y, and z in the set of outcomes it is the
case that if x is weakly preferred to y, and y is weakly preferred to z, then it must be the case
that x is weakly preferred to z, then it must be the case that x is weakly preferred to z, then it
must be the case that is weakly preferred to z.
Actors whose preference orderings do not meet these conditions-completeness and
transitivity-are said to be irrational.
Condorcet’s paradox illustrates that a group composed of individuals with rational preferences
does not necessarily have rational preferences as a collectivity; individual rationality is not
sufficient to ensure group rationality.
- Condorcet winner: an option is a Condorcet winner if it beats all other options in a series
of pair-wise contests.
All that Condorcet showed was that it is possible for a group of individuals with transitive
preferences to produce a group that behaves as if it has intransitive preferences. As a result,
Condorcet’s paradox erodes our confidence in the ability of majority rule to produce stable
outcomes only to the extent that we expect actors to hold the preferences that cause group
intransitivity.
they produce.
Deontological ethics: Evaluates the intrinsic value of actions, policies, or institutions in light of
the rights, duties, or obligations of the individuals involved.
Social Choice Theory: addresses the voting rules that govern and describe how individual
preferences are aggregated to form a collective group preference. Much of this is highly
mathematical.
A round-robin tournament pits each competing alternative against every other alternative an
equal number of times in a series of pair-wise votes.
- “pair-wise votes”
- Winner is whoever wins the most contests
An actor is said to be rational if she possesses a complete and transitive preference ordering
over a set of outcomes.
An actor has complete preference ordering if she can compare each pair of elements (e.g., x
and y) in a set of feasible outcomes in one of the following ways:
Actor prefers x to y
She prefers y to x
She is indifferent between x and y
An actor has transitive preference ordering if for any x, y, and z in the set of outcomes it is the
case that if x is weakly preferred to y, and y is weakly preferred to z, then it must be the case
that x is weakly preferred to z, then it must be the case that x is weakly preferred to z, then it
must be the case that is weakly preferred to z.
Actors whose preference orderings do not meet these conditions-completeness and
transitivity-are said to be irrational.
Condorcet’s paradox illustrates that a group composed of individuals with rational preferences
does not necessarily have rational preferences as a collectivity; individual rationality is not
sufficient to ensure group rationality.
- Condorcet winner: an option is a Condorcet winner if it beats all other options in a series
of pair-wise contests.
All that Condorcet showed was that it is possible for a group of individuals with transitive
preferences to produce a group that behaves as if it has intransitive preferences. As a result,
Condorcet’s paradox erodes our confidence in the ability of majority rule to produce stable
outcomes only to the extent that we expect actors to hold the preferences that cause group
intransitivity.
