Abstract
In the first of his 1985 Tanner Lectures at Harvard, Kenneth Arrow suggested that the doctrine of extended sympathy might, so to speak, come to the rescue of economists and philosophers left bereft by the Impossibility Theorem (according to which no social-choice function exists that satisfies a set of reasonable axioms of consistency, transitivity, independence or irrelevant alternatives, and …). Specifically, he made reference to the pre-Rawls suggestions of William Vickrey (1945) and of John C. Harsanyi (1955) as providing related derivations of additive interpersonal utilities by reliance on certain elements of extended sympathy.
I owe thanks to the MIT Sloan School of Management for my Gordon Y. Billard Fellowship, and to Aase Huggins for valiant editorial assistance.
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Samuelson, P.A. (1987). Sparks from Arrow’s Anvil. In: Feiwel, G.R. (eds) Arrow and the Foundations of the Theory of Economic Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07357-3_4
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