The basic problem in poverty measurement is how to weigh the income of different groups. This is a normative problem on which people differ in opinion, and hence we should seek a way of dealing with the issue that takes into account this plurality. In the paper, we suggest an approach to poverty...

Rawls (1971,1993) suggests that interpersonal comparisons of well-being should be based on a primary goods index, but it is well-known that in general this approach is not compatible with the Pareto principle. This is the indexing impasse. Sen (1985,1991) argues that this is partly due to the...

In the framework of ethical social choice theory, sustainability is justified by Efficiency and Equity as ethical axioms. These axioms correspond to the Suppes-Sen Grading principle. In technologies that are productive in a certain sense, the set of Suppes-Sen maximal utility paths is shown to...

It has been argued that any plausible egalitarian theory should give asbolute priority to the worst off in a conflict with the best off in society. In this paper, we show that this framework is closely linked to the leximin approach, and on the basis of a condition named the conditional...

Over the years, egalitarian philosophers have made some challenging claims about the nature of egalitarianism. They have argued that the Rawlsian leximin principle is not an egalitarian idea; that egalitarian reasoning should make us reject the Pareto principle; that the numbers should not count...