On Non-binary Personal Preferences in Society, Economic Theory and Racial Discrimination

This paper examines some of the consequences for economic theory of the replacement of binary personal preferences by non-binary personal preferences in an Arrow-Debreu society as in Debreu (1959), and reaches the conclusion that there is both much damage to existing theory and greater opportunity for providing formal explanations of such phenomena as discrimination, personal freedoms and power, among others, which are impossible to explain at a formal level on the basis of an economic theory that is founded on a choice theory that is based exclusively on binary relational personal preferences.