Liberty, equality, and impossibility: some general results in the space of 'soft' preferences

This paper is concerned with examining the mutual compatibility of the ethical principles of equity and liberty in a social choice framework of ordinally formulated vague preferences. With sufficiently weakened versions of the liberty and equity principles, one can secure an existence result in a 'relation-functional' setting. However, difficulties tend to re-appear in a 'choice-functional' setting, when one subscribes to the notion that while preference may be vague, choice must perforce be exact.