Social preferences, Equity, and Non-Expected Utility Theory

This paper explores the feasibility of an individualistic and equity-concerned aggregation of rational personal preferences. It is argued that, since violations of Bayesian rationality in individual decisions under uncertainty should also be apply to social preferences as determined by an ethical decision-maker, the social ordering resulting from aggregation will typically be different from the one advocated by Hardsanyi's utilitarianism. Equity-concerned social judgements will be more properly represented by considering equity not as a desirable general feature of interpersonal distributions but as an individual value which enters into the welfare assessment of each position to be occupied in the relevant society.