Corporations cannot exist, scholars rightly note, without being constituted by government. However, many take a further step, claiming that corporations are normatively distinct from other market actors because of this governmental provenance. They are mistaken. Like corporations, markets and contracts also require government for their creation. Governmental provenance does not distinguish corporations normatively because our coercive social institutions are pro tanto justified in re-arranging both corporate and non-corporate market activities on behalf of social and political values. The corporation is distinct only practically and prudentially, in that it represents a more proximate instrument for effecting morality in the economy.

I am extremely grateful to the five commentators for readingmy book and offering such interesting thoughts in reaction. Shortage of space may make my responses seem brusque. But of course they are not meant to be.

This article illustrates how axiomatic social choice theory can be used in the evaluation of measures of group fitness for a biological hierarchy, thereby contributing to the dialogue between the philosophy of biology and social choice theory. It provides an axiomatic characterization of the ordering underlying the Michod–Viossat–Solari–Hurand–Nedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism. The MVSHN index has been used to analyse the germ-soma specialization and the fitness decoupling between the cell and organism levels that takes place during the evolutionary transition to multicellularity. It is argued that some of the axioms satisfied by the MVSHN group fitness ordering are not appropriate for all stages in this transition.

1. Despite the plain fact that there is nothing in this world that can be proved without reliance on some assumption or another (perhaps only the assumption that the laws of logic are correct), there is an inalienable difference between an argument that begins by assuming what it is designed to establish and one that begins by assuming the contradictory of what it is designed to establish. Arguments of the first kind are uncontroversially acknowledged to be circular, or question-begging; though valid they achieve nothing. Those of the second kind conform to the classical pattern of reductio ad absurdum or indirect proof. A typical example is the proof of the irrationality of √2, which begins by assuming that for some integral m, n the identity m2/n2 = 2, and (using some trite principles of number theory) arrives at a contradiction. Nothing whatever is established or justified by arguments of the first kind, even granted the truth of all the other assumptions (if any), and the validity of the rules of inference; while the second may establish that, if those assumptions are true (and the rules of inference employed valid), then the additional assumption (that √2 is rational) is false.

This rejoinder to Roemer (this issue) examines Roemer's amendment to his EOp criterion, explains the similarities and differences between Roemer's approach to equality of opportunity and the economic literature inspired by the fair allocation theory, and proposes some clarifications on the compensation principle and the role of the reward principle in the definition of a responsibility-sensitive social criterion. It highlights the power of the ideal of respect for individual preferences with respect to the reward issue and the concern for potential harshness of the social criterion toward the individuals who fail to make good use of their opportunities. It discusses Roemer's objection against holding individuals responsible for their preferences.

Rosenberg (1986) argues that economists have embraced the methodology of scientific research programs, and the writings of Imre Lakatos (1978), at the same time that philosophers have been abandoning that approach. According to Rosenberg, the methodology of scientific research programs (MSRP) appears to allow some work in economics, which is neither tested nor testable, to be “scientific” nonetheless. That is, MSRP justifies some current practices which look hard to justify on strict falsificationist, or dogmatic positivist, grounds.

As made manifest by Clower's (1975) comments on their “science fiction” nature, general equilibrium theories (GET) present such peculiar and puzzling features that the methodologist must perforce seek some specific methodological accommodation for this part of economic theory. The role played by such theories in contemporary economics is so fundamental (in the sense of Green, 1981) that the impossibility of appraising them by means of any version of falsificationism, and their patent lack of (excess) empirical content if approached with the conceptual devices of the methodology of scientific research programs (MSRP), have prompted several scholars interested in the methodology of economics (although from different points of view and for even more different purposes) to search for a reasonable way out.

Alexander Rosenberg has played a large role in creating the philosophy of economics as a distinct area of philosophy. But since the publication of Microeconomic Laws in 1976, Professor Rosenberg's thinking about economics has been casting the subject in an increasingly uncomplimentary light. This development is reflected in Rosenberg's new book Economics–Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? In this stimulating work Rosenberg endorses the view that economics does not constitute scientific empirical knowledge. He says:

Roemer has a striking and novel criticism of Marx's thesis that capitalism is exploitative. Even if so, Roemer claims, that does not establish that it is morally objectionable. He argues from idealized models that involve what he calls ‘Marxian exploitation’, but do not have the consequences which, he says, Marxists think make exploitation bad – domination, alienation, and inequality – or have them only in unobjectionable ways. These models, Roemer thinks, show that the moral problem with capitalism that Marxian exploitation locates only imperfectly is unjust inequality. He develops an alternative notion of ‘property relations exploitation’, based on this charge, to replace the morally uninteresting notion of Marxian exploitation in assessing arguments for socialism.

This paper is about the relevance, to the definition of freedom, of values or goods other than freedom. In this respect,its subject matter is not at all new. However, I do believe that new light can be thrown on the nature of this relationship by paying more attention to another relationship – one which exists within the concept of freedom itself. There are two senses in which we can be said to possess freedom. Firstly, there is the sense in which we can be said to be free to do a certain particular thing. Secondly,there is the sense in which we can be said to possess a certain ‘amount’,‘degree’ or ‘quantity’ of freedom, in some overall sense.1 I believe that most recent accounts of the relationship between freedom and other goods are inconsistent, because they see those other goods as affecting the truth value of claims about freedom in the second sense, but not in the first.

A basic issue in political economy is the question of how a decentralized economy is possible: How can a system survive and, moreover, be efficient, if all decisions are taken independently, that is, without any explicit coordination? The issue has two sides to it. On the one hand, it is a “thought experiment,” falsifiable only on logical grounds, an object of debate for the sake of pure intellectual interest, even for people who might not live in a market economy. On the other hand, for those who do or might live in such an economy, a thought experiment of this kind contains a critical political dimension, for the conclusions derived from it will usually be appealed to in arguing about the ideal organization of the economy.

In a recent paper, Pierluigi Barrotta (1996) argues that Mises ‘ended up by defending an epistemological tenet very far from Kant's’ (p. 51), concluding that ‘Mises's apriorism cannot be vindicated through Kant's epistemology’ (p. 65). In contrast, I shall argue that certain of Mises's arguments can be reconstructed in Kantian terms, and thus the distance between Mises and Kant is not as extreme as Barrotta's argument may appear to suggest. Specifically, I shall argue that Mises, like Kant, seeks to establish the a priori nature of the category of causality. To this extent at least, Mises's apriorism can be vindicated through Kant's epistemology.

In their article “Roemer's ‘General’ Theory of Exploitation is a Special Case: The Limits of Walrasian Marxism,” Devine and Dymski portray me as some sort of Walrasian automaton who believes that phenomena that are not easily modelled using the Walrasian model of perfect competition do not exist. Their criticism of my theory assumes that I was attempting to model capitalism in its entirety, a task that, I agree, I failed to do. I did not propose a theory of accumulation, or of technological change, or of the methods by which capitalists maintain their ideological hegemony over workers, or of the methods by which they extract labor from labor power at the point of production. I was not, in short, trying to write an alternative to Das Kapital. My General Theory of Exploitation and Class (GTEC), as its Introduction explained, was an attempt at understanding the root causes of exploitation and class, so as to better understand how class formation and exploitation might occur in postcapitalist societies. To this end, I adopted a well-known scientific method: strip away many real aspects of the thing under study down to a minimal skeleton and see how many phenomena descriptive of the real thing one can generate. Then add more real aspects of the thing to the model, and see how much more one can generate.

In this paper I argue that libertarianism neither prohibits exchanges in which consent is gained through deceit, nor does it entail that such exchanges are morally invalid. However, contra James Child’s (1994) similar claim, that it is incapable of delivering these verdicts, I argue that libertarians can claim that exchanges involving deceitfully obtained consent are morally invalid by appealing to an external theory of moral permissibility.

A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person's private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person's basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this issue, which now goes by the name 'perspectival diversity'. This paper extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by enlarging the domain to include individual perspectives alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to see or perceive the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the paper imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society.

Whereas principles of justice adjudicate interpersonal conflicts, principles of prudence adjudicate intrapersonal conflicts – i.e., conflicts between the preferences an individual has now and the preferences he will have later. On a contractarian approach, principles of justice can be theoretically grounded in a hypothetical agreement in an appropriately specified pre-moral situation in which those persons with conflicting claims have representatives pushing for their claims. Similarly, I claim, principles of prudence can be grounded in a hypothetical agreement in an appropriately specified pre-prudential situation in which those temporal parts of a person with conflicting claims have representatives as advocates of their claims. During the course of developing the prudential contractarian methodology, I consider a dispute between those who would see principles of justice as the outcome of a choice (e.g., Rawls) and others (e.g., Gauthier) who argue for viewing principles of justice as the outcome of a bargain. I contend that the reasons I adduce in favor of viewing principles of prudence as the outcome of a choice weigh equally in favor of viewing principles of justice as the outcome of a bargain.

The debate over whether or not economics is value-free has focused on the fact-value distinction: “is” does not imply “ought.” This paper approaches the role of ethics in economics from a Thomistic perspective, focusing not on the content of economic analysis, but on the actions taken by economic researchers. Positive economics, when it satisfies Aristotle's definition of technique, enjoys a certain autonomy from ethics, an autonomy limited by a technique's dependence for guidance and justification on ethical reflection. The modern isolation of technique from ultimate ends entails the risk of mistaking the proximate ends of economics for ultimate ends, especially when applying economic methods in new ways or to new social phenomena.

This paper examines a special kind of social preference, namely a preference to do one's part in a mixed-motive setting because the other party expects one to do so. I understand this expectation-based preference as a basic reactive attitude (Strawson 1974). Given this, and the fact that expectations in these circumstances are likely to be based on other people's preferences, I argue that in cooperation a special kind of equilibrium ensues, which I call a loop, with people's preferences and expectations mutually cross-referring. As with a Lewis-norm, the loop can get started in a variety of ways. It is self-sustaining in the sense that people with social preferences have sufficient reason not to deviate.