Suchergebnisse

Commitment to co-operation -- Promise, performance, and enforcement -- State-of-nature co-ordination -- Social contract -- Social choice -- The foundations of voluntariness -- Constructive risk -- An ethics turnpike -- The unfairness of anarchy -- The return of the free rider

Government depends on collective decision making. Even in peaceful democracies, some decide for all. The author challenges the morality of this position. It is not different political systems that are at fault as the nature of politics itself.

Liberal justice is rooted in a system of conventions. They arise spontaneously as behavioural equilibria that bring mutual advantage to those adopting them. They protect life, limb, property and the pursuit of peaceful purposes, and require the fulfilment of reciprocal promises. Collective choice, where some impose choices on others who submit, violates liberal justice and reduces the set of freedoms. Liberalism and democracy are incompatible as organising principles and 'liberal democracy' is a contradiction in terms.

Examines the factors that facilitate the transformation from ordered anarchy to state. Discussion begins with a defense of the author's (1985) concept of the state as a unitary actor centered on its drive to maximize its discretionary power. Attention is given to social contract theory & the state's emergence via contractual means; the idea of the "rule-making rule" that seems a self-imposed constraint on the state, the paradoxes that this generates, & the need to be skeptical of the logic of a rule of rule making; the shrinkage of freedoms, eg, via taxation; & the surrender of a state's discretionary power resulting from the competition between political rivals. In this light, it is concluded that individuals surrender freedom inadvertently & bow to collective choice, while the state, despite the logic of trying to maximize discretionary power, will also inadvertently surrender this power, achieving only its own survival to no one's satisfaction. References. D. Edelman

This essay on the debate on trade made "fair" by regulation explores the question of the subjective meanings of the terms justice & fairness to argue that imposition of the terms on trade by political authority violates the freedom of contract. The insistent & recurrent demand that international trade must be fair instead of merely free is contextualized in a brief history of the factor-price equality theorem, the impacts of globalization, the arbitrariness of status quo agreements, & the inappropriateness of sentiment to justice. The many meanings of fairness are delineated, & egalitarian sympathies are asserted to inspire doctrine. The unreputable guide of intuition to moral judgments is related to empirically learned cause-effect functions, the evolutionary & adaptive propensity to fairness that lies outside standard rational payoff maximization. A discussion of Humean conventions of property & contract is related to the creation of rules, suum cuique in the securing of title to possessions, & the force of voluntary exchange. Appeals to fairness are concluded to override the demands of justice as an adaptive behavior of evolutionary & adaptive selection, violating the freedom of contract established by the system of spontaneously adopting rules that separate the free from the unfree. References. J. Harwell

Institutions, customs, laws are often, and sometimes implausibly, credited with efficiency. They serve a good purpose and if they had not arisen, we would have invented them. The claim is reassuring, though it may be no more than a pious lie. The creation of the state by social contract, and the adoption of supposedly rational customs by primitive peoples, serve as examples. Interpreting the welfare state as a mutual insurance scheme from which all can expect to profit is a classic of the kind.

Lord Layard recently suggested in a series of lectures at the LSE that economists should be concerned with developing policies to maximise human happiness. His bold resurrection of the Benthamite school invites the most forceful criticism that can be levelled against naïve utilitarianism.

If your dog guards your house, a widely held ethical theory of redistribution would contend that he is entitled to own part of it. Each contribution to a product justifies a claim to a share of it. In fact, the social product is produced by society as a whole and society may distribute it as it sees fit. The article argues that this reasoning is confused and misunderstands the function of contracts of exchange.