著者

崔 正勲

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2015, no.181, pp.181_129-181_143, 2015-09-30 (Released:2016-06-08)

参考文献数

30

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Amartya Sen advocated the “Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal,” or the Liberal Paradox, in 1970. After this, many scholars, such as R. Nozick, A. Gibbard, and J. Blau, tried to prove that his theory was inaccurate in varied manners. However, there has been no critical counter-argument against Sen’s theory, and so his theory has been called a “theorem.” In Sen’s later work, it is argued that the “impossibility” of a Paretian Liberal actually can be overcome. One such method was pointed out by Sen himself six years later: the Paretian epidemic is possibly solvable if an actor of two ones in a Liberal Paradox situation can behave as if it has the assurance-game preference or other-regarding preference, considering others’ rights and the maximization of social welfare. Sen also pointed out that two actors in the Liberal Paradox have the same preference orderings of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which indicates that individual rationality and social optimality can contradict one another. When individual rationality was the decisive factor to make a decision in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the actors would not obtain the most rational consequences in attempting to maximize their payoffs. Meanwhile, they can maximize their social utility if other-regarding preferences take precedence. This article will explore varied implications while applying Sen’s arguments to the First North Korean Crisis, which was an international crisis. Regarding the escalation of tension between the US and North Korea after the end of the Cold War, a contradiction to the Liberal Paradox is found. In the case of the Liberal Paradox, a cycle occurs when two actors who have different preference orderings are confronted totally or partially, and they claim that their preferences should be realized as a social decision regardless of the other’s preferences. While the cycle between the two players can be seen as a deadlock in diplomatic negotiations at the nation-state level, in reality, the US and North Korea showed not only the cycle caused by the crush of the rights legally based on Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), but also an escalation of tension beyond the theoretical cycle. That is, in the negotiations, they discussed how to deal with North Korean nuclear development, and they barely avoided a Second Korean War, which would have been the most irrational result. Why and how did the US and North Korea make the choices to escalate tension, possibly leading them to more irrational consequences than the diplomatic stalemate that would have accorded with Sen’s theory? The answer can be found in a hybrid manner between the Liberal Paradox and psychological approaches that posit rational actors can make irrational choices in the decision-making process when actors recognize circumstances in which they face the risk of losing their expected utility. At the end of this article, three implications of applying the Liberal Paradox to the First North Korean Nuclear Crisis will be pointed out.