Intuitively it would seem that choice is important for democracy. Yet the empirical question, whether people actually do value facing distinct platforms when they vote, remains open. In this paper I seek to remedy that situation by systematically addressing the question using cross-national survey data. Specifically, I investigate whether satisfaction with democracy depends on the number and/or the substance of the choices that are available to people when they vote. The analysis offers strong support for the idea that what matters most to voters is the substance of electoral choices. Although the number of choices also matters, the significance of this factor is conditional on being able to vote for a party that represents one's views, or on voting for the winner.

In the final sentence of the "Preliminary Remarks" to the Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill declares

The laws of Production and Distribution, and some of the practical consequences deducible from them, are the subject of the following treatise. (1848, p. 21)

It is almost two hundred pages before Mill asserts that

The laws and conditions of the Production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them. … It is not so with the Distribution of wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. (1848, p. 199)

Milton Friedman's famous methodological essay contains, along with much else, some strands that look as though they were taken from the “empirical-scientific” fabric described by Karl Popper (Popper, 1959, pp. 32, 37; see also Klant, 1984, pp. 33ff. for a very clear discussion). Think, for example, of Friedman's conviction that the way to test a (theoretically embedded) hypothesis is to compare its implications with experience (Friedman, 1953a in 1953b, pp. 9, 13, 14). Or of his more or less explicit espousal of the view that while no amount of facts can ever prove a hypothesis true, a single “fact” may refute it (ibid., p. 9). Or of his assertion that hypotheses are to be accepted only as provisionally true (ibid., p. 41), and then only after repeated efforts to refute them have failed (ibid., pp. 9, 22–23). The appearance of these Popperian ideas is not surprising.

Moral philosophers are fond of the dictum “ought implies can” and even deontologists normally admit the need to take account of consequences in the design of social institutions. Too often, however, philosophers fail to take advantage of the knowledge provided by the social sciences about the constraints and consequences of alternative forms of social organization. By discussing ideals in abstraction from the problems of institutionalization, they fail at least to see some of the important consequences and costs of a proposed ideal, and sometimes they fail even to understand the ideal itself.

This paper argues that capitalist social relations do not presuppose wage-labour. The paper defends a functional definition of the capitalist relations of production, in terms of what Marx calls the ’subsumption of labour by capital’. I argue that there are at least four modes of subsumption, one transitional to and one transitional from the capitalist mode of production. Unlike the capitalist mode of production, capitalist relations of production are compatible with the absence of a labour market, and even with the absence of workplace authority relations. The ambit of capitalist domination is therefore broader than typically thought.

One of the most common policy-related messages that economists present to non-economists is the superiority of cash over in-kind transfers as a policy tool. A good deal of government policy on behalf of the poor consists, of course, of various forms of in-kind assistance, such as medical care or food stamps. However, if we wish to help the poor, the argument goes, in-kind transfers are an inferior way to do so.

The question for those who are concerned with inequalities is not whether to be an egalitarian or a prioritarian. That choice is mislabelled and misconceived. The relevant question is why distributive inequalities are of more than merely instrumental importance with respect to unrelated goals, such as maximizing well-being. The answer is that lessening inequalities in well-being serves a fundamental commitment to equality of moral status. Depending on the circumstances and what is to be distributed, the underlying concern with equality of moral status (coupled with non-distributional concerns about deprivation) might make one resemble a prioritarian, a non-prioritarian egalitarian, or neither.

The literature of comparative economics as well as economic history is replete with references to productivity differences as reflecting relative efficiency in production. In socialist economics, for example, the longevity of the relative-productivity/relative-efficiency theme is apparent from Abram Bergson's (1948) early survey where, commenting on a productivity debate that had already been going on for over twenty years, he identified “the only issue outstanding” as the question “which is more efficient, socialism or capitalism?” The issue has continued to be addressed vigorously since then, and it is still outstanding. Again, in European economic history, John Nye (1987) recently pointed out that relative efficiency as reflected in relative productivity has been part and parcel of the postwar debate on French industrialization: the view that less productive and, therefore, “inefficient” family firms led to French “backwardness” in production.

Economic approaches to both social evaluation and decision-making are typically Paretian or utilitarian in nature and so display commitments to both welfarism and consequentialism. The contrast between the economic approach and any rights-based social philosophy has spawned a large literature that may be divided into two branches. The first is concerned with the compatibility of rights and utilitarianism (or Pare-tianism) seen as independent moral forces (e.g., the debate on the possibility of a Paretian liberal). This branch of the literature may be characterized as an example of the broader debate between the teleological and deontological approaches. The second is concerned with the possibility that substantial rights may be grounded in utilitarianism (or Pare-tianism) with the moral force of rights being derived from more basic commitments to welfarism and consequentialism. This branch of the literature may be characterized as an exploration of the flexibility of the teleological approach, and, in particular, its ability to give rise to views more normally associated with the deontological approach. This essay is concerned with the second branch of the literature.

I present an original model in judgment aggregation theory that demonstrates the general impossibility of consistently describing decision-making purely at the group level. Only a type of unanimity rule can guarantee a group decision is consistent with supporting reasons, and even this possibility is limited to a small class of reasoning methods. The key innovation is that this result holds when individuals can reason in different ways, an allowance not previously considered in the literature. This generalizes judgment aggregation to subjective decision situations, implying that the discursive dilemma persists without individual agreement on the logical constraints. Notably, the model mirrors the typical method of choosing political representatives, and thus suggests that no voting procedure other than unanimity rule can guarantee representation that reflects electorate opinion. Finally, I apply the results to a normative argument for unanimity rule in contract theory and juries, as well as to problems posed for deliberative democratic theory and the concept of representation.

Epistemic arguments play a significant role in the foundations of market liberalism as exemplified, in particular, by the work of F. A. Hayek. Competition in free markets is claimed to be the most effective device both to utilize the knowledge dispersed throughout society as well as create new knowledge through innovation competition. The fast pace with which new economic opportunities are discovered and costs are reduced is considered proof of the benefits of free markets to the common good. However, with its inherently unpredictable consequences, innovation competition is actually ambiguous in this respect. This feature raises questions over the stringency of market liberal pleas that oppose quests for redistribution and environmental concerns in an absolute fashion.

Empirical reports on scientific competition show that scientists can be depicted as self-interested, strategically behaving agents. Nevertheless, we argue that recognition-seeking scientists will have an interest in establishing methodological norms which tend to select theories of a high epistemic value, and that these norms will be still more stringent if the epistemic value of theories appears in the utility function of scientists, either directly or instrumentally.

More than many other Austrians, Mises tried to found aprioristic methodology on a well defined and developed epistemology. Although references to Kant are scattered rather unsystematically throughout his works, he nevertheless used an unequivocal Kantian terminology. He explicitly defended the existence of ‘a priori knowledge’, ‘synthetic a priori propositions’, ‘the category of action’, and so forth.

Most people at some point in their lives face transformative decisions that could result in experiences that are radically different from any that they have had, and that could radically change their personalities and preferences. For instance, most people make the conscious decision to either become or not become parents. In a recent but already influential book, L. A. Paul (2014) argues that transformative choices cannot be rational – or, more precisely, that they cannot be rational if one assumes what Paul sees as a cultural paradigm for rational decision-making. Paul arrives at this surprising conclusion due to her understanding of transformative experience as being both epistemically and personally transformative. An experience is epistemically transformative if it ‘teaches [a person] something she could not have learned without having that kind of experience’ (11), but it is personally transformative if it changes the person's point of view and her fundamental preferences (16).

Standard lessons from economics tell us that an externality creates inefficiency, and that this inefficiency can be removed by internalizing the externality. This papers considers how successfully these lessons can be extended to intergenerational externalities such as emissions of greenhouse gas. For intergenerational externalities, the standard lessons involve comparisons between states whose populations of people differ, either in their identities or their numbers. Common notions of efficiency break down in these comparisons. This paper supplies a new notion of efficiency that allows the lessons to survive, but at the cost of reducing their practical significance.

Lists of paid registrants at Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association from 2006–2008 were compared with lists of people appearing as presenters, commentators or chairs on the meeting programme those same years. These were years in which fee payment depended primarily on an honour system rather than on enforcement. Seventy-four per cent of ethicist participants and 76% of non-ethicist participants appear to have paid their meeting registration fees: not a statistically significant difference. This finding of no difference survives scrutiny for several possible confounds. Thus, professional ethicists seem no less likely to free-ride in this context than do philosophers not specializing in ethics. These data fit with other recent findings suggesting that on average professional ethicists behave no morally better than do professors not specializing in ethics.

Robert Nozick allegedly introduced his liberal theory of private ownership as an objection to theories of end-state justice. Nevertheless, we show that, in a stylized framework for the allocation of goods in joint ventures, both approaches can be seen as complementary. More precisely, in such a context, self-ownership (the basis for Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice) followed by voluntary transfer (Nozick’s principle of just transfer) can lead to end-state fairness (as well as Pareto efficiency). Furthermore, under a certain solidarity condition, the only way to achieve end-state fairness, following Nozick’s procedure, is to endorse an egalitarian rule for the initial assignment of rights.

We consider a special set of risky prospects in which the outcomes are either life or death (or, more generally, binary utilities). There are various alternatives to the utilitarian objective of minimizing the expected loss of lives in such prospects. We start off with the two-person case with independent risks and construct taxonomies of ex ante and ex post evaluations for such prospects. We examine the relationship between the ex ante and the ex post in this restrictive framework: There are more possibilities to respect ex ante and ex post objectives simultaneously than in the general framework, i.e. without the restriction to binary utilities (cf. Harsanyi's aggregation theorem). We extend our results to n persons and to dependent risks. We study optimal strategies for allocating risk reductions given different objectives. We place our results against the backdrop of various pro-poorly off (or prioritarian) value functions (Diamond 1967; Rabinowicz 2002; Fleurbaey 2010) for the evaluation of risky prospects.

This article presents a community-based account of salience as an alternative and a complement to the ‘natural salience’ approach which is endorsed by almost all game theorists who use this concept. While in the naturalistic approach, salience is understood as an objective and natural property of some entities (events, strategies, outcomes), the community-based account claims that salience is a function of community membership. Building on David Lewis’s theory of common knowledge and on some of its recent refined accounts, I suggest that salience acts as a correlating device in a correlated equilibrium. What is constitutive of salience is common understanding, the fact that agents have common knowledge that they share the same modes of reasoning with respect to a well-identified set of events. I argue that the basis for common understanding is community membership. The relevance of this account stems from the fact that it answers the objection that salience is either unnecessary or unable to account for coordination between rational agents.