Consumer Sovereignty and Human Interests

256 Pages·1986·2.096 MB·English

by  G. Peter Penz

Consumer sovereignty and human interests

Consumesro vereignty
andh umani nterests
G. PETER PENZ
York University
Toronto
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 1986
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1986
This digitally printed version 2008
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Penz, G. Peter
Consumer sovereignty and human interests.
"Developed out of a doctoral dissertation for the
University of Oxford" -Acknowledgements.
Includes index.
I. Welfare economics. 2. Consumers' preferences.
3. Basic needs. 4. Utilitarianism. 5. Political
ethics. 6. Political sociology. I. Title.
HB846.P46 1986 330.15 '5 85-22407
ISBN 978-0-521-26571-3 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-07091-1 paperback
TO THE MEMORY OF
HORST PAUL PENZ (1912-1975) and
ERNA OLGA PENZ (1888-1981)
The acceptance of "consumer sovereignty" as a basis for judg­
ing economic systems is fundamentally perhaps as much a
matter of ethics, philosophy and political theory as it is of
economics. In discussions of economic theory proper, it is
often taken as a postulate for which the primary justification
lies outside the realm of economics.
-William S. Vickrey, Microstatics (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 217
Contents
Preface page xi
Acknowledgments xiii
l Introduction l
Part I. Consumer sovereignty
2 The interest conception of consumer sovereignty 5
2.1 Consumer sovereignty and interests 5
2.2 The normative centrality of consumer
sovereignty 10
2.3 Alternative definitions of consumer sovereignty 12
Part II. The range of wants
3 Consumer sovereignty and private-want satisfaction 27
3.1 Private wants 27
3.2 Work wants 27
3.3 Environmental wants 33
3.4 The free-market-choice requirement and the
core version of private sovereignty 34
4 Social wants, normative concerns, and interests 41
4.1 Social wants and the constitutive conception of
interests 41
4.2 Various kinds of social wants as interests 44
4.3 "Privately oriented" and "other-regarding" wants 51
4.4 Normative criteria for interests 55
4.5 Personal sovereignty 58
vii
vm Contents
Part III. The quality of wants
5 Limits to individual rationality 61
5.1 The rationalistic conception of interests 61
5.2 Interests and ignorance concerning current
conditions and opportunities 63
5.3 Limits to practical rationality 66
5.4 Interests concerning the future 69
5.5 Limits to self-knowledge and irrationality in
ulterior preferences 77
6 The development of preferences and the evaluation
circularity 87
6.1 Interests, preferences, and the evaluation
circularity 87
6.2 The patterning of consumer preferences 92
6.3 The patterning of producer preferences 97
6.4 Cumulative socialization 103
6.5 Attempts to rescue the preference-based approach 114
Appendix: The technical conditions of the
evaluation circularity 118
Part IV. Measuring want satisfaction
7 The comparability problem of the want-satisfaction
principle 123
7.1 The want-satisfaction principle and calculus
requirements 123
7.2 Possible measures of want-satisfaction levels 125
7.3 Want satisfaction and normative judgments 132
Part V. Human interests and deprivation
8 Objective conceptions of human interests 139
8.1 Human sovereignty 139
8.2 Impersonally objective conceptions I: essentialist
ideals 143
8.3 Impersonally objective conceptions II: happiness 147
8.4 An intersubjective conception: basic needs 164
8.5 Objective human interests and freedom 175
8.6 The calculus of minimizing deprivation 181
Contents 1x
9 Deprivation under market competition and other
coordination mechanisms: an illustrative evaluation 186
9.1 Socioeconomic coordination mechanisms and
deprivation 186
9.2 Poverty 190
9.3 Poor working conditions 202
9.4 Social isolation 207
9.5 Psychological depression 210
9.6 Pure coordination mechanisms and deprivation 222
9. 7 The preference and human-interest perspectives
compared 224
References 226
Index 237