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

Abstract
The paper questions Binmore's identification of justice with fairness and his corresponding focus on bargains to the neglect of conventions, notably of ownership. Section 1 deals mainly with the role ascribed to man's earliest genetic heritage in shaping fairness norms and the putative effect of such norms on bargaining solutions. Section 2 argues that the scope of fairness as opposed to justice in determining the social order is quite narrow, It sketches a theory of fairness distinct from justice, derived from the principle of treating like cases alike.

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

Argues that liberalism lacks an irreducible & unalterable core element making it something of a loose political doctrine. This looseness is attributed to its foundations on the value of liberty; ie, it depends on value judgments. Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, & John Stuart Mill on liberalism are seen as responsible for denying liberalism a firm identity & to have hung liberalism with a utilitarian agenda. A call is made for a stricter liberalism, suggesting two basic propositions: a logical one is the presumption of freedom, & a moral one is the rejection of the rules of submission that imply the obligation of political obedience. 2 References. J. Zendejas

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.