Ever since Sen criticized the notion of internal consistency of choice, there exists a widespread perception that the standard rationalizability approach to the theory of choice has difficulties in coping with the existence of external norms. We introduce a concept of norm-conditional rationalizability and show that external norms can be made compatible with the methods underlying the traditional rationalizability approach. To do so, we characterize norm-conditional rationalizability by means of suitable modifications of revealed preference axioms that are well established in the theory of rational choice on general domains as analysed in contributions by Richter and Hansson, for example. We compare our approach to alternative suggestions that have appeared in response to Sen's criticisms, and we discuss its links to Sen's notion of self-imposed choice constraints.

According to Mark Rubinstein (2006) ‘In 1952, anticipating Kenneth Arrow and John Pratt by over a decade, he [de Finetti] formulated the notion of absolute risk aversion, used it in connection with risk premia for small bets, and discussed the special case of constant absolute risk aversion.’ The purpose of this note is to ascertain the extent to which this is true, and at the same time, to correct certain minor errors that appear in de Finetti's work.

Paradoxical results concerning judgment aggregation have recently been invoked to defend the thesis that a corporate agent can be morally responsible for a decision without any of its individual members bearing such responsibility. I contend that the arguments offered for this irreducibility thesis are inconclusive. They do not pay enough attention to how we evaluate individual moral responsibility, in particular not to the role that a flawed assessment of the normative reasons that bear on the issue to be decided on play in this context. I go on to propose a method for distributing corporate responsibility to individual members within the judgment aggregation framework.

This note comments on Bruni and Sugden's interesting notion of fraternity among contract partners as joint commitment to cooperate for mutual benefit. I raise two points on their paper, both concerning the role of sacrifice. First I maintain that, differently from other social preferences, guilt aversion (or warm glow) does not imply self-sacrifice. Secondly, I argue that aiming for mutual benefit does not prevent individuals from facing trade-offs between their own and their partners’ surplus, so the notion of sacrifice cannot be entirely eschewed. To the contrary, reciprocal ‘sacrifices’ enhance cooperative intentions and help create feelings of friendliness.

An article by Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden published in this journal argues that market relations contain elements of what they call ‘fraternity’. This Response demonstrates that my own views on interpersonal relations and markets – which originated in the feminist analysis of caring labour – are far closer to Bruni and Sugden's than they acknowledge in their article, and goes on to discuss additional important dimensions of sociality that they neglect.

This paper responds to Gui and Nelson's separate comments on our paper ‘Fraternity’, which analysed sociality in markets as joint commitment to mutual assistance. We argue that our analysis is fundamentally different both from Nelson's analysis (a mixture of self-interested and intrinsic motivations) and from that provided by theories of warm glow or guilt aversion, as discussed by Gui. We agree with Gui that, in initiating and maintaining cooperative relationships, individuals sometimes incur personal costs to benefit others without any certainty of reciprocation, but we argue that the intentions underlying such actions are cooperative rather than self-sacrificing.