On Reconciling Arrow’s Theory of Social Choice with Harsanyi’s Fundamental Utilitarianism

The last paragraph of Kenneth Arrow’s Nobel Lecture is characteristic of the man: The philosophical and distributive implications of the paradox of social choice are still not clear. Certainly there is no simple way out. I hope that others will take this paradox as a challenge rather than as a discouraging barrier (Arrow 1973a; 1974).