TY - JOUR
T1 - Freedom of choice: John Stuart Mill and the tree of life
AU - Nieto, Jorge
AU - Alcalde-Unzu, Jorge
AU - Ballester, Miguel A.
PY - 2012/1/1
Y1 - 2012/1/1
N2 - This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John Stuart Mill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage of choice, but in the ordered collection of choices that a person can make in her life. We then suggest to represent a life in a tree structure, where each node represents a state of life and the edges between nodes will represent possible decisions in life. In this new framework, we propose a set of axioms that imply the following family of measures of lifetime's freedom of choice: the lifetime's freedom of choice has to be evaluated by a weighted sum of all possible states of life an individual might visit, with weights representing the number of decisions the individual took to reach that state. © 2011 The Author(s).
AB - This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John Stuart Mill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage of choice, but in the ordered collection of choices that a person can make in her life. We then suggest to represent a life in a tree structure, where each node represents a state of life and the edges between nodes will represent possible decisions in life. In this new framework, we propose a set of axioms that imply the following family of measures of lifetime's freedom of choice: the lifetime's freedom of choice has to be evaluated by a weighted sum of all possible states of life an individual might visit, with weights representing the number of decisions the individual took to reach that state. © 2011 The Author(s).
KW - Freedom of choice
KW - Autonomy
KW - Tree of life
UR - https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5511819
U2 - 10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8
DO - 10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8
M3 - Article
SN - 1869-4187
VL - 3
SP - 209
EP - 226
JO - SERIEs
JF - SERIEs
IS - 1-2
ER -