How do economists persuade their readers that one policy is superior to another? A glance at the literature on welfare economics quickly provides the answer to this question: Economists enter policy debates armed with mathematical models, evaluating options on the basis of their consequences. Economists typically classify a policy change as a welfare (or “potential Pareto”) improvement with respect to the status quo if the gain realized by the winners exceeds the harm sustained by the losers. The best policy becomes the one that generates the highest net benefit.

Hausman and McPherson defend welfare economics by claiming that even if welfare does not consist in preference satisfaction, preferences still provide good, if fallible, evidence of welfare. I argue that this strategy does not yet fully solve the problems for welfare economics stemming from the preference satisfaction theory of welfare. More work is needed to show that our self-interested preferences are sufficiently reliable, or in some other sense our best, evidence of well-being. Thus, my aim is to identify the challenges that remain and clarify what additional work is needed before Hausman and McPherson's defence of welfare economics succeeds.

An article by Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden published in this journal argues that market relations contain elements of what they call ‘fraternity’. This Response demonstrates that my own views on interpersonal relations and markets – which originated in the feminist analysis of caring labour – are far closer to Bruni and Sugden's than they acknowledge in their article, and goes on to discuss additional important dimensions of sociality that they neglect.

How should consumers exercise their basic economic powers? Recently, several authors have argued that consumption to bring about social change must be democratic. Others maintain that we may consume in ways that we believe promote positive change. This paper rejects both accounts and provides a new alternative. It argues that, under just institutions, people may consume as they like as long as they respect the institutions’ rules. Absent just institutions, significant moral constraints on consumption exist. Still, it is permissible, if not obligatory, for people to pursue non-democratic, genuinely positive, change within whatever moral constraints exist.

No net loss approaches to environmental policy claim that policy should maintain aggregate levels of natural capital. Substitutability between natural assets allows losses in some assets to be compensated for by gains in others while maintaining overall levels of natural capital. This paper argues that significant goods that matter to people’s well-being will be lost through a policy of no net loss. The concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services that underpin the no net loss approach to environmental policy cannot capture important dimensions of value that are central to human well-being.

What is the value of a life? How should we regard death? This paper uses the methods of economics to defend some of the views of Epicurus against the utilitarian approach that welfare economics takes for granted.

Martin Hollis, in the introduction to the collection of Rationality and Relativism he edited recently with Steven Lukes, describes himself as the most arch of arch rationalists, “by which we mean, merely, that [we] reject the forthright relativization of truth and reason.” You might suppose that his self-description would place him unambiguously in the army of traditionalists arrayed against what Richard Rorty fondly calls the New Fuzzies (like himself and me). You might suppose, then, that Hollis would indulge in furious letter writing to, say, Harper's, telling us that “we need to stand shoulder to shoulder against the growing army of enemies of rationality. By that I mean the followers of the fashionable cult of absolute relativism, emerging from philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, and deconstructionism.” You might suppose that he would go on in this way equivocating between “rationality” and “rationalism,” identifying the people he dislikes with the enemies of civilization: fascists, Stalinists, bikers, bomb throwing nihilists — Richard Rorty and Wayne Booth and Stephen Toulmin riding into town on their Harley- (or Donald-) Davidsons, spurning warrants for belief and good reasons, reading pornographic comic books (the new literary canon), and snarling at the townsfolk huddled behind the local syllogism.

Building on an overview of dual systems theories in behavioural economics, the paper presents a methodological assessment in terms of the mechanistic explanations framework that has gained prominence in philosophy of the neurosciences. I conclude that they fail to meet the standards of causal explanations and I suggest an alternative ‘dual functions’ view based on Marr’s methodology of computational neuroscience. Recent psychological and neuroscience research undermines the case for a categorization of brain processes in terms of properties such as relative speed. I defend an interpretation of dualities as functional, without assigning them to specific neurophysiological structures.

This paper argues for two propositions. (I) Large asymmetries of power, status and influence exist between economists. These asymmetries constitute a hierarchy that is steeper than it could be and steeper than hierarchies in other disciplines. (II) This situation has potentially significant epistemic consequences. I collect data on the social organization of economics to show (I). I then argue that the hierarchy in economics heightens conservative selection biases, restricts criticism between economists and disincentivizes the development of novel research. These factors together constrain economics’ capacity to develop new beliefs and reduce the likelihood that its outputs will be true.

Social thinkers frequently remind us that people differ on what constitutes personal well-being, but that even when they don't differ, they disagree over the extent to which one person's well-being can be permitted to be traded off against another's. They tell us that political differences are to be traced to differences in people's conceptions of personal and social well-being. We are given to understand, in other words, that people's ethics differ.

Numerous instruments have been developed to elicit numerical values that represent the strength of preference for different health states. However, relatively few studies have attempted to analyse the reasoning processes that people employ when they are asked to answer questions based on these elicitation methods. The lottery equivalents method is a preference elicitation instrument that has recently received some attention in the literature. This study attempts a qualitative analysis of the use of this instrument on a group of 25 relatively highly educated respondents. For each of three health states considered in the study, a substantial number of respondents refused to trade the chance of survival for a possible improvement in the health state. Therefore, many respondents violated an assumption that is necessary for the lottery equivalents instrument to generate cardinal health state values. These findings place a question mark against the usefulness of the lottery equivalents method, and add weight to the suspicion that ‘preferences’ are constructed according to how questions are framed.

In his recent book, Economics – Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns, Alexander Rosenberg has offered a forceful critique of the scientific pretensions of economics. I am encouraged to note that in his JEL review, Wade Hands (1993) singles out Rosenberg's ‘important discussion of intentionality’ as one of the most significant aspects of the book. Encouraged, because this was exactly my impression, and Hands's judgment confirmed my intention to respond to Rosenberg's argument. I hope, however, to be able to disappoint Hands's expectation that this aspect of Rosenberg's work ‘will be least challenged by economists’!

Theoretical works in economics usually have a core consisting of proofs that a “model-economy” has certain properties. The economist constructs a model that can be looked on as a description of an economy, and then proves that certain relations hold in this economy and/or that certain relations in this economy depend on certain specific characteristics. The model-economy is usually described as simplified or idealized.

One of the central motifs of G. A. Cohen's work was his opposition to capitalism in the name of justice. This motif was fully in view in Cohen's work on Robert Nozick's libertarianism: Cohen carefully reconstructed and relentlessly criticized Nozick's apologetics of the free market, which, he thought, was internally coherent but unconvincing. This article suggests that Cohen's opposition to libertarianism did not, however, go far enough, and identifies two respects in which Cohen's position could and should have been more critical of that philosophy.

The first concerns Cohen's negative agenda, that is, his critique of Nozick's libertarianism, the second Cohen's more positive agenda, the formulation of his egalitarian view. With regard to the first, this article argues that Cohen did not subject to full critical pressure the idea of self-ownership libertarians endorse, and consequently accorded it greater inequality-engendering power than libertarians may claim for it. With regard to the second point, this article suggests that Cohen implicitly assumed a market-friendly answer to the question of what consequences people who make choices should be held responsible for, which he could and should have questioned.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick contrasts entitlement theories of justice and “traditional” theories such as Rawls', utilitarianism or egalitarianism, and advocates the former against the latter. What exactly is an entitlement theory (or conception or principle) of justice? Nozick's book offers two distinct characterizations. On the one hand, he explicitly describes “the general outlines of the entitlement theory” as maintaining “that the holdings of a person are just if he is entitled to them by the principles of justice in acquisition and transfer, or by the principle of rectification of injustice (as specified by the first two principles of just acquisition and transfer)” (Nozick, 1974, p. 153). On the other hand, his famous “Wilt Chamberlain” argument against alternative theories is first said to apply to (all) “non-entitlement conceptions” (p. 160), and later to any “end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice” (p. 163) — which amounts to an implicit characterization of an entitlement conception (theory, principle) as a conception of justice which is neither end-state nor patterned.

Carl Knight argues that lexical sufficientarianism, which holds that sufficientarian concerns should have lexical priority over other distributive goals, is ‘excessive’ in many distinct ways and that sufficientarians should either defend weighted sufficientarianism or become prioritarians. In this article, I distinguish three types of weighted sufficientarianism and propose a weighted sufficientarian view that meets the excessiveness objection and is preferable to both Knight’s proposal and prioritarianism. More specifically, I defend a multi-threshold view which gives weighted priority to benefits directly above and below its thresholds, but gives benefits below the lowest threshold lexical priority over benefits above the highest threshold.

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several ‘calibration dilemmas’, in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources.