Waiving and exercising rights in the theory of social situations

Introduction In his seminal paper Sen (1970) has introduced a subject of individual rights into social choice theory. Sen’s paradox of a Paretian liberal has provoked some controversies among economists, political scientists and philosophers (for a comprehensive survey, see Sen 1976, 1983; Suzumura 1983; Wriglesworth 1985). Immediately some authors, such as Nozick (1974) and Bernholz (1974), challenged Sen’s original formulation of rights within the social choice-theoretic framework. As a result of this criticism, Gardenfors (1981) and Sugden (1985) have suggested an alternative formulation of rights within the game-theoretic framework. Both have claimed that their formulations could better capture our intuition about rights. Indeed, since the publication of a joint paper by Gaertner, Pattanaik and Suzumura (1992) the focus of most researchers has shifted from producing impossibility (possibility) results to discussing an adequacy (or inadequacy) of different formulations of individual rights (see among others Deb 1994; Dowding and van Hees 2003; Hammond 1996; Pattanaik 1996; Pattanaik and Suzumura 1996; Riley 1992; Sen 1992; van Hees 2000).