Following a long-standing philosophical tradition, impartiality is a distinctive and determining feature of moral judgments, especially in matters of distributive justice. This broad ethical tradition was revived in welfare economics by Vickrey, and above all, Harsanyi, under the form of the...

We provide characterizations of a class of rank-mobility measures and of a specific member of this class. These measures are based on the Kemeny distance for orderings. We use the well-known replication-invariance property to ensure that our measures are applicable in variable-population...

We provide a general method for extending fair social preferences defined for riskless economic environments to the context of risk and uncertainty. We apply the méthod to the problems of managing unemployment allowances (in the context of macroeconomic fluctuations) and catastrophic risks (in...

How should we make value judgments about wealth inequality? Harsanyi (1953) proposes to take an individual who evaluates her well-being by expected utility and ask her to evaluate the wealth possibilities ex-ante (i.e. before she finds her place in society, i.e., under the "veil of ignorance" of...

This paper carries out a brief analysis of Amartya Sen’s thinking on Justice, based on Part IV of his book The Idea of Justice. Besides of describing Sen’s thoughts on the subject, the paper aims to contextualize it in the evolution of Sen’s work and in the general discussion on Justice in...

We present a new version of the overtaking criterion, which we call generalized time-invariant overtaking. The generalized time-invariant overtaking criterion (on the space of infinite utility streams) is defined by extending proliferating sequences of complete and transitive binary relations...

This paper studies a class of social welfare relations (SWRs) on the set of infinite utility streams. In particular, we examine the SWRs satisfying Q-Anonymity, an impartiality axiom stronger than Finite Anonymity, as well as Strong Pareto and a certain equity axiom. First, we characterize the...