Treading a fine line: Characterisations and impossibilities for liberal principles in infinitely-lived societies

This paper extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by mariotti and veneziani (2009a) to infinitely-lived societies. First, some novel characterisations of inegalitarian leximax social welfare relations are derived based on the individual benefit principle (ibp), which incorporates a liberal, non-interfering view of society. This is surprising because the ibp does not explicitly incorporate any preference for inequality, nor does it assign priority to well-off members of society. Second, some impossibility results are derived that highlight a general tension between standard fairness and efficiency axioms in social choice, and a liberal principle of non-interference that generalises ibp.