In a conflict between two people, one person wants one thing and the other wants something else and they think they can't both have what they want. Suppose that what they want can only be the outcome of some joint action. Adam must do either y or z and Eve either y' or z' – here y-and-y' would be one joint action, y-and-z' would be another, and so on. Adam wants the outcome of his doing z while Eve is doing y'. Eve wants the outcome of her doing z' while Adam is doing y. Each thinks that these outcomes can't both be had.

Thirty years after its publication, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is still the source of much discussion in economics. Its rel-ativistic tone has often been used to fuel the claims of dissident traditions against the prevailing orthodoxy, or at least to plead the case for intellectual pluralism (Dow, 1985). Through his arguments regarding the incommensurability of different theoretical approaches to a particular subject, Kuhn's work has allowed many to argue that dissident traditions are just as legitimate as orthodoxy for analyzing a subject, since there is no objective or independent means of arbitrating between them. This has caused an opposing response by those more supportive of the prevailing theoretical approach to economics. The latter have tried to find a defense to relativist challenges in more “rational” philosophies of science, such as that of Lakatos (Blaug, 1975).

Various writers in the Western liberal and libertarian tradition have challenged the argument that enforcement of law and protection of property rights are public goods that must be provided by governments. Many of these writers argue explicitly for the provision of law enforcement services through private market relations.

In The Moral Dimension (Etzioni, 1988), Amitai Etzioni claims, as did Albert Hirschman in Morality and the Social Sciences (Hirschman, 1980), that people often act from moral motives, that economics needs to recognize this, and that it will be significantly changed by doing so. I agree, though I think the changes may be smaller than Etzioni believes – I shall be explaining why. But Etzioni goes further. He makes a specific claim about the sort of morality that motivates people: it is deontological. In this paper, I shall examine what this means, how far it is true, and what difference it makes.