More On Preferences and Freedom

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comThe paper seeks to fonnalize the notion of effective freedom or the freedom to realize meaningful choices. The definition of meaningful choice used in this paper is based on the preference orderings that a reasonable person may have. 1 argue that only alternatives that can be selected by a reasonable person from the set 01' all possible alternatiV'es provide a meaningful choice. 1 discuss this approach and provide an axiomatization of the cardinality rule and two lexicographic versions of this rule in this context.I am grateful to Prasanta K: Pattanaik for many stimulating discussions and helpful suggestions. Several improvements are due to the comments of Salvador Barberá, Iñigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe and anonymous referee. Financial support from DGESIC project PB-98-024 is gratefully acknowledgePublicad