The Computational Challenge of Amartya Sen’s Social Choice Theory in Formal Philosophy

Ethical Responsibility vs. Ethical Responsiveness in Conscious and Unconscious Communication Agents

“…Without the possibility of deepening here as I did elsewhere the informational [22] and hence computational [21] and logical [1,2,23] consequences of such an approach for modeling the natural and the artificial quantum neural computations, it is sufficient to recall here two significant points as to our precedent discussion.…”

“…It is, therefore, worth emphasizing that such a dynamic approach to relational ethics is what also characterizes Amartya Sen's revolutionary theory of the comparative distributive justice in the realm of social and economic theories [36], for which he was awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1998, and which is modeled in the formal framework of the so-called "social choice theory" [37]. Now, as we discussed elsewhere [2], the fundamental computational challenge impeding the extensive use of Sen's theory in social and economic modeling is precisely the same as that addressed in the above quoted NISP paper, namely the necessity of a dynamic continuously updated weighing of the variables that in principle in relational ethics, like in the case of data streaming [22,26], requires a coalgebraic dynamic and not statistical approach to machine learning in AI. The classical statistical approach, indeed, is thought of as dealing with "big" but "static" bases of data.…”

“…In our information age, humans and machines are depending on each other ever more strongly, like many "conscious" and "unconscious" communication agents [1]. This opens the way to a systematic comparison between the moral "responsiveness" of natural (brains) and artificial (AI systems) unconscious communication agents, on the one hand, and the moral "responsibility" of their conscious human owners/users/designers, on the other hand, with respect to the common social/linguistic environment with its unavoidable ethical constraints [1,2]. Now, the main problem at issue when we discuss the actual challenges in moral philosophy related to Neuroethics (NE) and to Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied to autonomous systems is the following.…”

Toward a Human-Centered Economy and Politics: The Theory of Justice as Fairness from Rawls to Sen

“…Nevertheless, the contemporary approach of Arrow and Sen to SCT is the extension to this discipline of the axiomatic method of formal logic. In this way, they transformed it into a branch of formal philosophy, effectively the "formal social philosophy" [10][11][12], as I anticipated in the Introduction. In this formal sense, the definition of SCT emphasizes that the core of the methodology consists in defining a suitable aggregation criterion, which is different for the different contexts of application, of the individual preferences/choices into a single collective preference/choice "that adequately reflects 'the will of the people'" ( [32], p. 133).…”

“…This can be compared with the welfare of the worst-off individual in another social state, and so on, so to have recursively, at least in principle, a complete social ordering. ( [12], p. 106) However, Sen demonstrates that this is not formally true in practice. Indeed, the maximin criterion in Rawls' absolute and non-contextual interpretation, is not compatible, neither with Arrow's "social 6 In this comparison, I refer also to [12] that is particularly useful for our aims.…”