Nobel laureate James Buchanan downplays any theory of ethical politicians, focusing instead on rules which economize personal restraint, setting lower moral expectations. Through a constructive critique of James Buchanan’s work, I argue these lowered expectations come at a cost: degraded character in politicians, leading to constitutional decay. Buchanan lacks a theory to address choices between (a) action which furthers the politician’s self-interest and (b) action which protects some already accepted, good rule, but which does not further their self-interest. I generate a theory of the Principled Politician, an agent characterized by a prior commitment to fair play.

The paper provides a neurophilosophical assessment of a controversy between two neuroeconomic models that compete to identify the putative object of neural utility: goods or actions. We raise two objections to the common view that sees the ‘good-based’ model prevailing over the ‘action-based’ model. First, we suggest extending neuroeconomic model discrimination to all of the models’ neurophilosophical assumptions, showing that action-based assumptions are necessary to explain real-world value-based decisions. Second, we show that the good-based model’s presumption of introducing a normative neural definition of economic choice would arbitrarily restrict the domain of economic choice and consequently of economics.

This paper examines whether, and if so when, luxury tax is justifiable. After a characterization of luxury tax, I critically examine several arguments that have been or can be made in defence of luxury tax, including Ng’s diamond good argument and a variation of Frank’s positional good argument. I put forward an alternative, expressive argument, according to which luxury tax can help to create and sustain social norms that discourage conspicuous luxury consumption and display of wealth. I explain several ways in which luxury tax fails to achieve the expressive goal and brings about unintended consequences.

According to the Welfare Diffusion Objection, we should reject Prioritarianism because it implies the ‘desirability of welfare diffusion’: the claim that it can be better for there to be less total wellbeing spread thinly between a larger total number of people, rather than for there to be more total wellbeing, spread more generously between a smaller total number of people. I argue that while Prioritarianism does not directly imply the desirability of welfare diffusion, Prioritarians are nevertheless implicitly committed to certain principles for comparing different-number populations which, together with the Prioritarian same-person axiology, imply the desirability of welfare diffusion.

Philosophical errors are errors of a very peculiar nature.

Obviously, errors occur in the different areas of science, as well as in everyday life. But these errors are sooner or later recognized and exposed, and – most importantly – once they are recognized and exposed, they are essentially rendered harmless, at least for those versed in the respective discipline. A false historical datum, an experimental error or a calculation mistake becomes indefensible as soon as it is noticed.

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.

In a recent article, Edward Saraydar (1989) takes economists and economic historians to task for equating productivity and efficiency in comparative economic analysis. Although I found his thesis interesting, I was a bit surprised to see selected remarks from my article on firm size in nineteenth-century France (Nye,1987) used to frame his criticism of productivity comparisons as a means of making prescriptive statements. The passages selected may mislead the reader as to the nature of my arguments. Let me quote Saraydar on this: … I argue that … the problem with equating productivity with efficiency is that from the neoclassical standpoint this strongly suggests a prescriptive view - a view that things should be or should have been different - and thereby frees the analyst from the need to justify the utility costs that might be or might have been required to make things different. Thus, in the French industrialization debate, for example, Nye points out that evidence that smaller family firms were less productive would support the conclusion “that nineteenth-century French firms were too small (for whatever reasons) and that consequently French industry suffered from inefficiency” (Nye, 1987, pp. 667–68). Suppose the evidence to which Nye refers to existed. [My emphasis] Distributive considerations aside, in neoclassical economics a more Pareto-efficient state by its very nature is to be preferred to a less efficient one. Therefore, the implication is that family firms should have been larger and more productive. However, suppose also that the plethora of small family firms in nineteenth-century France, in fact, constituted a longstanding, widely accepted, socially imbedded institution. Clearly, the traditionalist thought-experiment and conclusion would ignore the potential costs in utility or satisfaction to owners of factors of production, a utility loss that may well have been required to make the “more efficient.” transformation to a relatively few large-scale industrial firms. That potential utility loss cannot be ignored and should be part of the analysis. (Saraydar, 1989, p. 56)

This paper introduces a condition for rational choice that states that accepting decision methods and normative theories that sometimes entail that the act of choosing a maximal alternative renders this alternative non-maximal is irrational. The paper illustrates how certain distributive theories that ascribe importance to what the status quo is violate this condition and argues that they thereby should be rejected.

In this paper I study intentions of the form ‘I intend that we . . .’, that is, intentions with a we-content, and their role in interpersonal coordination. I focus on the notion of epistemic support for such intentions. Using tools from epistemic game theory and epistemic logic, I cast doubt on whether such support guarantees the other agents' conditional mediation in the achievement of such intentions, something that appears important if intentions with a we-content are to count as genuine intentions. I then formulate a stronger version of epistemic support, one that does indeed ensure the required mediation, but I then argue that it rests on excessively strong informational conditions. In view of this I provide an alternative set of conditions that are jointly sufficient for coordination in games, and I argue that these conditions constitute a plausible alternative to the proposed notion of epistemic support.