Fair Compensation With Different Social Concerns for Forgiveness

Abstract

[Abstract] Forgiveness is an ethical ideal that advocates that a fresh start should be conferred upon those individuals who have changed their preferences and regret their previous decisions. Despite the ethical debate that such an idea generates, only a few papers have dealt with this issue in depth, and they have just focused on the case of full compensation for regret. Therefore, based on efficiency, robustness, and ethical requirements, we characterise a social ordering function that formally connects the ideal of forgiveness to the problem of compensating individuals when they differ in both their preferences and their initial endowment. This social ordering allows us to rank allocations that may or may not be associated with different concerns for forgiveness. Specifically, it proposes reducing inequality between reference-comparable budget sets.