Many practical decisions, in medicine and elsewhere, alter the lengths of people’s lives; many affect the number of people who are born; and many do both. Decision makers need to attach a value to changes of these sorts. In the past the value of prolonging life and the value of changes in population have generally been treated separately. This paper explains the need for an integrated treatment: a theory of the value of living. In one sense, prolonging a life and bringing into existence an extra person are alternative ways of doing the same thing: both bring it about that a period of life is lived that otherwise would not have been lived. But there is also a vital difference: in one case the extra period of life comes to someone who exists already; in the other it comes to a new person. The paper discusses a number of principles that might be used in developing an integrated theory of the value of living.

In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called Equality of What? Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realised in a given society. In this study I comment on answers to Sen’s question in recent philosophical literature. I describe and criticize what a number of authors (and notably Rawls and Sen) of egalitarian persuasion have said about the dimension(s) or respect(s) in which people should be made more equal, when the price in other values of moving towards greater equality is not intolerable.

This essay explores Sen’s claim that rights-realization can be consequentially evaluated. Supporting this claim, it attempts to show that the value pluralism thereby presupposed is sufficient to render superfluous the idea — advanced by Sen and others — of ‘agent-relativity’ as a structural feature of ethical judgment.

The paper surveys, without proofs, recent axiomatic results on the utilization of common property resources, by this author and some others. Problems discussed include the division of unproduced commodities (the traditional fair division problem), and the cooperative production of a private or public good.

Axioms contrast No Envy with two monotonicity properties, respectively when the population owning the resources in common increases, and when these resources themselves grow.

We try to operationalise Sen’s concept of the living standard using questionnaire data on the economic situation of the Belgian unemployed. We use factor analysis to reduce the number of basic functionings and to avoid possible overlap between them. The factors obtained can be interpreted in a natural and transparent way : they refer to social isolation, general feeling of happiness, physical functioning, microsocial contact, degree of activity and financial situation. Factor scores on these functionings are related in a meaningful way to the socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents.

People vary in both tastes and talents. What is the most sensible formulation of the egalitarian ideal once this fact is fully taken into account? The paper examines a number of answers that have been offered to this question, in particular Ronald Dworkin’s counterfactual insurance schemes, and argues against them. It then presents an alternative proposal. The latter generalizes Bruce Ackerman’s notion of undominated genetic diversity, it can be interpreted as a condition of potential envy-freedom, and it is consistent with, though more specific than, Amartya Sen’s capability-based approach.

This paper analyzes the optimal allocation of a given antipoverty budget consistent with various usual measures of poverty. It is shown that it is generally optimal to give all the budget either to the poorest or to the richest of the poor. It is only with the Sen index of poverty that it is sometimes optimal to combine both types of allocation. This property may be related to the normalization rule used in the derivation of that measure and sheds some new light on the axiomatics of poverty measurement.

This article presents a proof of Arrow’s Theorem which highlights the theorem’s relationship to welfarism and which emphasizes its underlying geometric structure. In addition, this method of proof is adapted to provide a proof of a single-preference-profile version of Arrow’s Theorem. The relationship between Arrovian social choice theory and Bergson-Samuelson welfare economics is also considered.

The paper explores the notion of freedom of choice which is of considerable importance in welfare economics and the theory of social choice. Three plausible axioms are introduced for ranking alternative opportunity sets in terms of the degrees of freedom that they offer to the agent making choices. It is shown that, under these axioms, judgements about degrees of freedom of choice have to be based on the naive principle of simply counting the number of available options.

In this paper we apply the theory of tax reform to derive empirical results about the structure of indirect taxes in Belgium. We focus on the equity-efficiency trade-off and try to formulate conclusions which are relevant for policy makers. To integrate the merit good component in the indirect taxes on tobacco and transportation, we compute the implicit valuation attached to them by policy makers. This component is considerable and affects the whole structure of tax rates.