La théorie du choix social qui s'est développée durant les dernières décennies, notamment dans la ligne des travaux d'Arrow et de Sen , ne s'est pas seulement soldée par une série de résultats négatifs exprimés dans les théorèmes d'impossibilité d'Arrow, de Sen et d'autres; ses notions centrales ont aussi été utilisées de manière fort variée au point que cette théorie souffre aujourd'hui d'un déficit important qui se traduit par de multiples indéterminations conceptuelles.

The tenuous claims of cost-benefit analysis to guide policy so as to promote welfare turn on measuring welfare by preference satisfaction and taking willingness-to-pay to indicate preferences. Yet it is obvious that people's preferences are not always self-interested and that false beliefs may lead people to prefer what is worse for them even when people are self-interested. So welfare is not preference satisfaction, and hence it appears that cost-benefit analysis and welfare economics in general rely on a mistaken theory of (...) well-being. This essay explores the difficulties, criticizes standard defences of welfare economics, and then offers a new partial defence that maintains that welfare economics is independent of any philosophical theory of well-being. Welfare economics requires nothing more than anevidentialconnection between preference and welfare: in circumstances in which people are concerned with their own interests and reasonably good judges of what will serve their interests, their preferences will be reliable indicators of what is good for them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA recent line of argument insists that replacing democracy with markets would improve social decision making due to markets’ superior use of knowledge. These arguments are flawed by unrealistic assumptions, unfair comparisons, and a neglect of the epistemic limits of markets. In reality, the epistemic advantages of markets over democracy are circumscribed and often illusory. A recognition of markets’ epistemic limits can, however, provide guidance for designing institutions in ways that capture the advantages of both.

J’arguerai ici que tout en repoussant d’une main une conception du changement social basé sur la sélection naturelle des pratiques sociales et des individus qui y participent, les théories normatives qui font appel à des modélisations des choix sociaux, qu’ils soient de nature économique, politique ou morale, en entretiennent potentiellement les conséquences. Plus précisément, j’arguerai que les modèles que l’on utilise encore le plus volontiers dans les sciences sociales, c’est-à-dire ceux de la théorie des jeux, de la théorie de la (...) décision ou de la négociation rationnelle, contribuent à répercuter, au plan normatif, les deux aspects — social et individuel — de la sélection naturelle. L’argument s’appuie sur une analyse de la théorie standard de l’utilité et montre que la conception de la rationalité maximisante définie dans ce cadre formel incorpore les exigences de la sélection à celles de la rationalité.I shall argue that though most theoreticians of social change firmly refuse normatively to endorse the natural selection of practices and individuals, they sometimes tacitly validate the consequences of such a conception of social change. More precisely, I shall argue that the formal apparatus still often used in social sciences — such as game theory, bargaining theory or decision theory — contribute to carrying on, at the normative level the social and individual aspects of natural selection. The argument rests on an analysis of what has come to be regarded the standard theory of utility and attempts to show that maximising rationality defined in that framework incorporates the requirement of the selection to those of rationality. (shrink)

Some current attempts to go beyond the narrow scope of rational choice theory (RCT) in the social sciences and the artificial reconstructions it sometimes provides focus on the arguments that people give to justify their beliefs and behaviors themselves. But the available argumentation theories are not constructed to fill this gap. This article argues that relevance theory, on the contrary, suggests interesting tracks. This provocative idea requires a rereading of Sperber and Wilson's theory. Actually, the authors do not explicitly support (...) RCT, and Sperber has even strongly criticized methodological individualism, which most of the time underlies RCT, in favor of infra-individualism. A key point of the argument presented here is to show that Sperber and Wilson do not firmly distinguish between infra-individualism and subintentionality. Only subintentionality is needed. Key Words: argumentation • rational choice • relevance theory • methodological individualism. (shrink)