Pluralism, Intransitivity, Incoherence

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511575488.012

10 - Pluralism, Intransitivity, Incoherence

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2009

William A. Edmundson

Edited by

Mark D. White

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Mark D. White: Affiliation:
City University of New York

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Summary

For the real problem of morality, and of the point or meaning of existence, is not in discerning the basic aspects of human well-being, but in integrating those various aspects…[into] one or another of the many admirable forms of human life.

ETHICS OUT OF LAW AND ECONOMICS?

The methodologies of economics have cast revealing, if garish, light upon legal institutions and processes. In response to the criticism that those methodologies rely upon unrealistic assumptions about human rationality, the field of law and economics has lately taken an empirical turn. The bounded nature of our reasoning powers, with the implications of that boundedness, has moved from the fringes toward the center of discussion. But the methods of economics have also been taken in a different and more abstract direction recently: they have been applied to questions about the metaphysical nature of value that lie in the department of ethics that philosophers sometimes refer to as axiology. If economics is purged of its seemingly crude assumptions about what is valued, it may have a lot to tell us about the structure of value. Or such is the hope. The focus of this chapter is on the question of whether value in its plural nature can be held to behave in ways amenable to economic methods.

PLURAL VALUES

Experience reveals to us a host of things that we respond to as good or as bad. That tiramisu I had for dessert at dinner last week was good.

Type: Chapter
Information: Theoretical Foundations of Law and Economics , pp. 184 - 202

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511575488.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2008

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