Rationality, markets, and morals: RMM Band 5 (2014)

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Colin Mayer: Firm Commitment
(2014) Ziegler, Moritz
Ordering Anarchy
(2014) Thrasher, John
Ordered social life requires rules of conduct that help generate and preserve peaceful and cooperative interactions among individuals. The problem is that these social rules impose costs. They prohibit us from doing some things we might see as important and they require us to do other things that we might otherwise not do. The question for the contractarian is whether the costs of these social rules can be rationally justified. I argue that traditional contract theories have tended to underestimate the importance of evaluating the cost of enforcement and compliance in the contract procedure. In addition, the social contract has been understood narrowly as a method of justifying specifically moral or political rules. I defend a broader version of contractarianism as a justificatory model that can be used to evaluate any set of social rules or institutions that impose costs on agents. In so doing, I argue that contractarianism is a general method of evaluating and justifying the rules that order the structure of social life.
Children’s Rights with Endogenous Fertility
(2014) Taylor, Brad R.
This paper uses hypothetical contractarianism to consider the value of children's rights laws as a means of protecting children. Laws protecting children from their parents have the unintended but predictable consequence of making child-rearing less desirable for some parents and thereby reducing the number of children born. Such laws therefore produce a trade-off between the expected wellbeing of actual and possible persons. I show that a possible child behind an appropriate veil of ignorance may rationally oppose laws which benefit some and harm no actual children.
Hume’s Theory of Justice
(2014) Spector, Horacio
Hume developed an original and revolutionary theoretical paradigm for explaining the spontaneous emergence of the classic conventions of justice-stable possession, transference of property by consent, and the obligation to fulfill promises. In a scenario of scarce external resources, Hume's central idea is that the development of the rules of justice responds to a sense of common interest that progressively tames the destructiveness of natural self-love and expands the action of natural moral sentiments. By handling conceptual tools that anticipated game theory for centuries, Hume was able to break with rationalism, the natural law school, and Hobbes's contractarianism. Unlike natural moral sentiments, the sense of justice is valuable and reaches full strength within a general plan or system of actions. However, unlike game theory, Hume does not assume that people have transparent access to the their own motivations and the inner structure of the social world. In contrast, he blends ideas such as cognitive delusion, learning by experience and coordination to construct a theory that still deserves careful discussion, even though it resists classification under contemporary headings.
You Are Not Worth the Risk: Lawful Discrimination in Hiring
(2014) Scholes, Vanessa
Increasing empirical research on productivity supports the use of statistical or `rational' discrimination in hiring. The practice is legal for features of job applicants not covered by human rights discrimination laws, such as being a smoker, residing in a particular neighbourhood or being a particular height. The practice appears largely morally innocuous under existing philosophical accounts of wrongful discrimination. This paper argues that lawful statistical discrimination treats job applicants in a way that may be considered degrading, and is likely to constrain people's freedoms in relation to employment, thus giving us reason for moral concern.
Anarchy, State, and Property
(2014) Lindblom, Lars
The fundamental function of the state is safeguarding the safety of its citizens. The combination of Nozick's invisible hand explanation with his theory of justice implies that individuals can have full private property rights in the state. An individual with such property rights thus has the right to sell and destroy what he or she owns. This implies that it is perfectly fair to buy a state and dismantle it, thereby leaving citizens without protection. I conclude that Nozick's theory of the state fails since it cannot guarantee the protection of its citizens' safety.
Social Yes; Contract No
(2014) Hardin, Russell
Social contract theory is incoherent and it does not work as desired. Among the most obvious disanalogies is that contracts are enforced by a third party, commonly the state. There is no such external enforcer for a constitution. Contractarian theorists typically ignore all such issues and use the metaphor of contract very loosely to ground a claim that citizens are morally obligated to defer to government by their consent, as the parties to a standard legal contract would be legally obligated. David Hume's term is acquiescence. He compellingly argues that actual citizens do not believe their own legal or political obligations depend on their having agreed to their social order. More often than not our interests are simply better served by acquiescing in the rules of that constitution than by attempting to change it. The forms of commitment that are important for constitutional and even for much of conventional social choice are those that derive from the difficulties of collective action to re-coordinate on new rules. They are inherent in the social structure of the conventions themselves, a structure that often more or less automatically exacts costs from anyone who runs against the conventions without anyone or any institution having to take action against the rule breaker. Establishing a constitution is itself a massive act of coordination that, if it is stable for a while, spawns conventions that depend for their maintenance on their self-generating incentives and expectations and that block alternatives.
Expanding the Nudge: Designing Choice Contexts and Choice Contents
(2014) Grill, Kalle
To nudge is to design choice contexts in order to improve choice outcomes. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein emphatically endorse nudging but reject more restrictive means. In contrast, I argue that the behavioral psychology that motivates nudging also motivates what may be called jolting--i.e. the design of choice content. I defend nudging and jolting by distinguishing them from the sometimes oppressive means with which they can be implemented, by responding to some common arguments against nudging, and by showing how respect for preferences over option sets and their aggregate properties may require the trimming of option sets, as well as helpful choice contexts.
Consent as the Foundation of Political Authority - A Lockean Perspective
(2014) Dietrich, Frank
The article focuses on the justification provided by classical contract theory for the right of states to enact laws and the corresponding obligation of political allegiance. At first the distinction between political authority and parental authority developed by John Locke in his seminal work "Two Treatises of Government" is explored. Thereafter it is discussed why the interests of individuals in the creation of a state fail to vindicate the exercise of governmental power. As regards David Hume's influential objections to contract theory, it is argued that the consent criterion of political legitimacy withstands his criticism. Hume cannot establish that the core idea of Locke's justificatory approach is wrong; he merely demonstrates that hardly any existing state meets the consent requirement. Finally the question is discussed which conditions a state must fulfil in order to be entitled to claim that its citizens tacitly approve of its authority.
Preference and Similarity between Alternatives
(2014) Binder, Constanze
We discuss how information about choice-relevant differences between alternatives can be revealed from preference information. We provide axiomatic characterisations of two classes of Similarity Revelation Rules: one that allows for different similarity thresholds for different pairs of alternatives, and one in which the threshold is the same for all pairs of alternatives. A third result proves the necessary and sufficient condition for the characterised class of rules to yield a transitive similarity relation. The article concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the analysis and the relationship between transitivity (of preferences) and the choice-relevant similarities between options.

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