Welfarist-consequentialism, similarity of attitudes, and Arrow’s general impossibility theorem

Two features of Arrow’s social choice theory are critically scrutinized. The first feature is the welfarist-consequentialism, which not only bases social judgements about right or wrong actions on the assessment of their consequences, but also assesses consequences in terms of people’s welfare and nothing else. The second feature is a similarity of people’s attitudes towards social outcomes as a possible resolvent of the Arrow impossibility theorem. Two extended frameworks, one consequentialist and the other non-consequentialist, are developed. Both frameworks are shown to admit some interesting resolutions of Arrow’s general impossibility theorem, which are rather sharply contrasting with Arrow’s own perspective. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2004