Individual Rights Revisited

Since Amartya Sen's contribution on the impossibility of a Paretian liberal, his formulation of libertarian rights has been under debate. In this paper, the authors highlight some important strands in this debate, and achieve some conceptual clarification of the different and often incompatible views of individual rights. They demonstrate in terms of a counterexample and general reasoning that Sen's concept can, more often than not, be inconsistent with our intuitive view of rights and fails to capture important categories of rights. An alternative formulation in terms of game form is introduced and its relative merit vis-a-vis Sen's formulation is discussed.