Sympathy, Commitment, and Preference

The recent opportunity to reread Amartya Sen’s many writings on preference and choice as a unit increased my appreciation of their depth and intricacy and of the wit and humanity of their author. It also made me realize that I had persistently misread them, mistakenly substituting my own notion of “preference” for Sen’s. While still very much in Sen’s camp in rejecting revealed preference theory and emphasizing the complexity, incompleteness, and context dependence of preference and the intellectual costs of supposing that all the factors influencing choice can be captured by a single notion of preference, I shall contest his view that economists should recognize multiple notions of preference.