Review of Economic Philosophy

Tag: Moral philosophy

  • A Market for Values

    Abstract

    Individual autonomy is a good in itself but also a necessary condition for strong communities. In this article, I propose to create a market for experiences of values, which would offer an incentive to exercise functional autonomy, meant as the ability to choose moral, organizational and cultural values independently from one’s social role. This instrument would contribute to shaping a social identity and to strenghtening community. I also argue that the current proposals to « change capitalism » overlook the importance of autonomy, as they largely rely on the role of money.

    Beginning of the article

    The political and cultural debate has long underlined the need to promote environmental and social sustainability as an unavoidable urgency. Also in the economic sphere, several voices propose to overcome or radically change capitalism. However, beyond the appropriate analyses for instance on the limits of a purely subjective approach to value, these proposals do not capture the basic element that Max Weber and many other social scientists have emphasized for more than a century, namely the dominant role of instrumental rationality in our lives.

    Indeed Weber offered an essential analysis of the processes of rationalization in capitalist societies and of its elements: intellectualization, impersonality, bureaucratic control over human lives. And he showed that, while the formal-procedural rationality [Zweckrationalität] is essential in indicating the consequences or results of actions, it is not necessarily consistent with, and may even contradict substantive-value rationality [Wertrationalität], which is rather an expression of ultimate meaning (as argued by Talcott Parsons) and intrinsic value. Weber clearly indicated the risks for freedom and agency which come from the iron cage of a dominant formal rationality, a place which hosts the “last man” for whom it might well be truly said:
    Specialist without spirit, sensualist without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity never before achieved
    My proposal for a market for moral, organizational and cultural values, described in this article, is based on the idea of fostering value rationality, and it is in service of a better relation between economics and ethics, individual and community, capitalism and democracy…

    Keywords

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    Codes JEL : A12, A13, Z10.

    [See the article on Cairn]

  • From Utilitarianism to Paternalism: When Behavioral Economics meets Moral Philosophy

    Abstract

    Most behavioral economists take the normative implications of their experimental findings to be broadly paternalistic. They tend to suggest that the results of behavioral economics logically entail the extension of the set of public interventions on the market. In this article, I show that this conclusion follows from an implicit normative reasoning that is unsustainable because behavioral economists remain committed to standard welfare economics. I suggest that the behavioral economists’ defense of paternalism can be understood as an attempt to maximize a social welfare function taking into account the fact that individuals make incoherent choices. But this defense depends on a theory of rational preferences that behavioral economists do not have. Moreover, a defense of paternalism in a welfarist framework leads to downplay the agency dimension of persons. Alternative defenses of soft paternalism may exist but likely require that normative behavioral economics gives up welfarism.

    Classification JEL : A13, B41, D03, D60

    Keywords

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