# J. S. Mill's Liberal Principle and Unanimity

## TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for evaluating policies based on combined subjective preferences and objective interests, aligning with Pareto's unanimity criterion under certain conditions.

## Contribution

It introduces a new welfare evaluation framework that integrates subjective and objective considerations, with conditions ensuring consistency with Pareto's unanimity.

## Key findings

- Provides sufficient conditions for welfare criteria to match Pareto's ranking.
- Analyzes interdependent ordinal preferences among agents.
- Establishes a theoretical basis for policy evaluation combining different welfare notions.

## Abstract

The broad concept of an individual's welfare is actually a cluster of related specific concepts that bear a "family resemblance" to one another. One might care about how a policy will affect people both in terms of their subjective preferences and also in terms of some notion of their objective interests. This paper provides a framework for evaluation of policies in terms of welfare criteria that combine these two considerations. Sufficient conditions are provided for such a criterion to imply the same ranking of social states as does Pareto's unanimity criterion. Sufficiency is proved via study of a community of agents with interdependent ordinal preferences.