Rationality, markets, and morals: RMM Band 4 (2013)
Neueste Zugänge
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Commitment and Goals
(2013)In this Comment, I examine Christoph Hanisch's recent contribution to this journal. In commenting on Hanisch's essay, I offer an interpretation of Amartya Sen's notion of `commitment' which makes committed choices both ... -
Social Contract Theory Should Be Abandoned
(2013)I argue that social-contract theory cannot succeed because reasonable people may always disagree, and that social-contract theory is irrelevant to the problem of the legitimacy of a form of government or of a system of ... -
Nozick’s Proviso: Misunderstood and Misappropriated
(2013)After almost forty years, Robert Nozick's seminal right-libertarian classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia continues to stand at the center of much of the discussion regarding property and its initial acquisition. Nozick's ... -
A Governing Convention?
(2013)In this essay I argue that one can understand the relationship between those who rule and those who are ruled in civil society as an implicit contractual relationship or contract by convention. I use variations of the ... -
Contractarianism as a Broad Church
(2013)I defend the claim, made in a previous paper, that `a Humean can be a contractarian', against the criticisms of Anthony de Jasay. Jasay makes a categorical distinction between `ordered anarchy' (which he associates with ... -
Invisible Hand Processes and the Theory of Money
(2013)This paper explores, and rejects, the plausibility--advanced by a number of economists and recently re-affirmed by Robert Nozick--of employing an `invisible hand explanation' to account for the existence of money as a ... -
Social Contract: The Last Word in Moral Theories
(2013)Most meta-ethical theories fail either for lack of real content or because they fail to make needed distinctions, or to give sufficient account of what a moral theory is about. Positing that values are intuited is useless ... -
Conduct and Contract
(2013)Political philosophy relies on three alternative types of theory to explain social order. The first, is order anarchy, built on the system of spontaneous Humean conventions. They are equilibria, self-enforcing or enforced ... -
Negative Goals and Identity: Revisiting Sen’s Critique of Homo Economicus
(2013)Sen's critique of the homo economicus conception of choice asserts that agents who `displace' their goals, and instead choose on the basis of others', are not therefore irrational. I first defend Sen against the objection ... -
Fairness That Money Can Buy. Procedural Egalitarianism in Practice
(2013)Contrary to communitarian market criticism institutions relying on money and bidding can strengthen faculties of `self-governance'. Securing procedurally egalitarian bidding on the basis of declared monetary evaluations ... -
Achieving Pareto-Optimality: Invisible Hands, Social Contracts, and Rational Deliberation
(2013)I begin with two simple, similar interactions. In one, maximizing agents will reach a Pareto-optimal equilibrium, in the other, they won't. The first shows the working of the Invisible Hand; the second, its limitations. ... -
Why the Conventionalist Needs the Social Contract (and Vice Versa)
(2013)The recent renaissance of work on conventions, informal institutions, and social norms has reminded us that between the state and individual choice is a network of informal social rules that are the foundation of our ... -
External Validity and the New Inductivism in Experimental Economics
(2013)The idea of external validity, which is well-known in the social sciences, has recently also been emphasized in experimental economics. It has been argued that external validity is an important criterion in experimental ... -
Hume and the Social Contract. A Systematic Evaluation
(2013)The article systematically explores the compatibility of Hume's political philosophy and contractarianism by reconstructing Hume's criticism of the idea of a social contract. In a nutshell, the dispute concerns the theoretical ...