John Rawls argues that it is possible to describe a suitably defined initial situation from which to form reliable judgements about justice. In this initial situation, rational persons are deprived of information that is ‘irrelevant from the standpoint of justice’. It is rational, Rawls argues, for persons choosing principles of justice from this standpoint to be guided by the maximin rule. Critics, however, argue that (i) the maximin rule is not the appropriate decision rule for Rawls's choice position; (ii) the maximin argument relies upon an imprecise account of the satisfactory minimum to be secured under the maximin rule; or that (iii) Rawls relies upon unrealistic assumptions about diminishing marginal value. These critics, I will suggest, argue from a number of assumptions that are confused or false. The satisfactory minimum that choosers in the original position – employing the maximin rule – seek to achieve is not a minimum level of primary goods, nor is the satisfactory minimum sought under the maximin rule supplied by the difference principle. I will argue that the maximin argument is more robust than has generally been recognized and that this argument performs a number of important functions in clarifying the nature and implications of Rawls's argument for justice as fairness.

Neuroeconomics focuses on brain imaging studies mapping neural responses to choice behaviour. Economic theory is concerned with choice behaviour but it is silent on neural activities. We present a game theoretic model in which players are endowed with an additional structure – a simple “nervous system” – and interact repeatedly in changing games. The nervous system constrains information processing functions and behavioural functions. By reinterpreting results from evolutionary game theory (Germano 2007), we suggest that nervous systems can develop to “function well” in exogenously changing strategic environments. We present an example indicating that an analogous conclusion fails if players can influence endogenously their environment.

In his Comment ‘Adam Smith on the Morality of the Pursuit of Fortune’, Richard Arlen Kleer accepts much of the argument in my article ‘Signifying Voices’ (Brown, 1991) but insists that I have ‘gone too far’ (Kleer, 1993). Kleer agrees that there is a moral hierarchy in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) where benevolence and self-command are ranked higher than justice and prudence, but he is uneasy with the conclusion that economic activity and the pursuit of gain are ‘amoral’ activities and insists that they do have a significant moral standing. In addition, although Kleer accepts a good deal of the stylistic analysis, again he is uneasy with the results that are derived from it. This reply will take each of these aspects in turn.

In the ‘Introduction’ to Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman's stated intentions are to: (i) establish the role of competitive capitalism as a system of economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom; (ii) indicate the proper role of government in a free society; and (iii) return the term ‘liberal’ ‘… to its original sense – as the doctrines pertaining to a free man’ (1962, p. 6). In fact, Friedman accomplishes none of these things. This essay has three distinct, though related, objectives: first, to compare Friedman's position with the liberal alternative; second, to show why Friedman's position is more properly regarded as libertarian than liberal; and third, to assess the quality of Friedman's argument in its own right. My purpose is to demonstrate that Friedman overlooks the important liberal insight that the unrestricted accumulation of private propety may limit rather than promote individual freedom. This omission is crucial. Not only does it divorce Friedman's conception from liberalism, it also vitiates his case for economic freedom as a necessary condition for political freedom.

This symposium publishes for the first time three key contributions to the debate on the nature and importance of the distinction between egalitarianism (the view that it is in itself bad, when and because it is unfair, for some to be worse off than others) and prioritarianism (the view that each person's welfare has diminishing marginal moral value and that the moral value of a person's welfare depends only on that person's level of welfare, and not on how anyone else fares). These papers were commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000. They were intended for publication in a WHO volume which has not yet materialized, and this has hindered access to these important papers. Permission was therefore secured from the WHO to publish them here.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of non-cooperative games that shows why the unilateralism of best-reply reasoning fails to capture the mutuality of strategic interdependence. Drawing on an intersubjective approach to theorizing individual agency in shared context, including a non-individualistic model of common belief without infinite regress, the paper develops a general model of a 2 × 2 simultaneous one-shot non-cooperative game and applies it to games including Hi-Lo, Stag Hunt, Prisoners’ Dilemma, Chicken, BoS and Matching Pennies. Results include High as the rational choice in Hi-Lo, and Cooperate as a possible rational choice in the Prisoners’ Dilemma.

In his critique of rational choice theory, Amartya Sen claims that committed agents do not (or not exclusively) pursue their own goals. This claim appears to be nonsensical since even strongly heteronomous or altruistic agents cannot pursue other people's goals without making them their own. It seems that self-goal choice is constitutive of any kind of agency.

In this paper, Sen's radical claim is defended. It is argued that the objection raised against Sen's claim holds only with respect to individual goals. Not all goals, however, are individual goals; there are shared goals, too. Shared goals are irreducible to individual goals, as the argument from we-derivativeness and the argument from normativity show. It is further claimed that an adequate account of committed action defies both internalism and externalism about practical reason.

Even where willingness-to-pay as a measure of welfare impact is adjusted for diminishing marginal utility, welfare economics is shown to favour policies that add to the life expectancy or that enhance the quality of life of persons who are already better-off. I propose an alternative, Equal Respect methodology, under an axiomatic claim that at the point of decision the prospective life years of all individuals are of equal intrinsic social value. This justifies equal valuation of risk mitigation across all persons; similarly, all appraised impacts should be scaled to accord equal respect to difficult but no-less-valuable lives.