Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine

Abstract

The aim of this article is to introduce the theory of judgment aggregation, a growing research area in economics, philosophy, political science, law and com- puter science. The theory addresses the following question: How can a group of individuals make consistent collective judgments on a given set of propositions on the basis of the group membersíindividual judgments on them? This problem is one of the fundamental problems of democratic decision-making and arises in many di§erent settings, ranging from legislative committees to referenda, from expert panels to juries and multi-member courts, from boards of companies to the WTO and the UN Security Council, from families to large social organiza- tions. While each real-world case deserves social-scientiÖc attention in its own right, the theory of judgment aggregation seeks to provide a general theoretical framework for investigating some of the properties that di§erent judgment ag- gregation problems have in common, abstracting from the speciÖcs of concrete cases.