%0 Journal Article
%T Freedom of choice: John Stuart Mill and the tree of life
%A Jorge Alcalde-Unzu
%A Miguel A. Ballester
%A Jorge Nieto
%J SERIEs
%@ 1869-4195
%D 2012
%I 
%R 10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8
%X This essay deals with the notion and content of freedom of choice proposing a new set up and a new family of measures for this concept which is, indeed, an ethical value of paramount importance in a well ordered and open society. Following some ideas of John Stuart Mill, we propose that freedom of choice has to be understood not in a single stage of choice, but in the ordered collection of choices that a person can make in her life. We then suggest to represent a life in a tree structure, where each node represents a state of life and the edges between nodes will represent possible decisions in life. In this new framework, we propose a set of axioms that imply the following family of measures of lifetime¡¯s freedom of choice: the lifetime¡¯s freedom of choice has to be evaluated by a weighted sum of all possible states of life an individual might visit, with weights representing the number of decisions the individual took to reach that state.
%K Freedom of choice
%K Tree of life
%K Autonomy
%K D63
%K D71
%U http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13209-011-0053-8