Abstract

In 1970 A.K. Sen formulated the "Liberal Paradox" and he proved that there was a conflict between individual rights (Sen's "condition of liberalism") and social rationality (Pareto optimality). This article contains an analysis of classical conditions in the context of this inconsistency and a new way of approaching this problem. The datum for these considerations was a supposition that the conflict can appear only in societies composed of people with nonliberal preferences. The liberality level of preferences can be described as a position in a two-dimensional space. The first dimension is "interested in my own problems" and the other is "protection of other people's rights". The main result indicates when the conflict between liberalism and optimality appears. All analyses were based on full sets of individual preferences for two selected situations (the first one: 2 persons and 4 social alternatives and the other one: 2 persons with strong preferences and 6 social alternatives).

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