This paper addresses how to think about the permissibility of introducing deadweight costs (so-called ‘ordeals’) on candidate recipients of goods in order to attain better outcomes. The paper introduces some distinctions between different kinds of value dimensions that should be taken into account when such judgements are made and draws from the literature on comparisons across different value dimensions in order to canvas what sort of situations one might arguably face when evaluating ordeals. In light of the distinctions drawn and the possibilities canvassed, the paper proceeds to outline what circumstances indicate which of the possible situations one is in.

How does an individual decision maker update his or her beliefs in the light of others’ beliefs? We present an empirical investigation that varies decision makers’ access to other peoples’ beliefs: whether they know what course of action others have taken (in this case how a problem is solved) and whether they know why this course of action was taken (why a particular solution is preferred). We propose a number of process models of advice taking that do and do not accommodate the reasons given for belief (epistemic social information), and evaluate which is used through model comparison techniques.

In Economics individuals are defined by their preferences over the consequences of their own actions and the actions carried out by others. In contrast, Simone Weil depicts the individual as continuously re-constituted by the contact that he establishes with reality via his action. Such an action is aimed at achieving an effect in the physical world, but what makes it human is not success per se, but rather the fact that it stems from reasoning and planning. Affliction is caused by effort carried out mechanically like that of a beast of burden, when the individual has no opportunity to exercise reason for choosing how to confront reality's ever-challenging hazards and necessity.

Simone Weil also emphasizes the importance of the socially forged language in affecting the individual's horizon and his ability to act meaningfully. In particular, foresight cannot be assumed in situations of oppression and affliction, which are extremely hard to communicate exactly because they imply an alienation between reason and action.

These observations of Simone Weil suggest new dimensions which standard economic modelling has hitherto avoided.

As a writing partnership, Christian List and Philip Pettit are probably best known for a paper in Economics and Philosophy that describes and generalizes the ‘discursive dilemma’ (List and Pettit 2002). That paper is one of the main points of reference for what is now a large literature on the aggregation of judgements – a literature to which List and Pettit have continued to contribute, individually and jointly. Their new book Group Agency reviews and synthesizes that body of work, and proposes an analysis of group agency in which the aggregation of judgements plays a central role.

In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that morality pertains primarily to character, and that actions have moral content only to the extent that they signal good or bad character. I formalize his signalling theory of moral/immoral actions using simple game-theoretic models. Conditions exist under which there is a separating equilibrium in which actions do indeed credibly signal character, but conditions also exist in which there is only a pooling or semi-separating equilibrium. A tradeoff is identified between the signalling value of actions, and the consequentialist goal of incentivizing all character types to choose beneficial actions.

The philosophical debate concerning political exchange has largely been confined to debating the desirability of vote trading; where individuals can sell their votes or buy votes from others. However, I show that the vote credit systems prevalent in public choice theory entirely avoid the common objections to political exchange that afflict vote trading proposals. Namely, vote credit systems avoid equality concerns and inalienability concerns. I offer an alternative critique to formal mechanisms that encourage political exchange by drawing on the role that impartiality and impartial moral judgements play in democratic and electoral institutions.

Professor Sutton's thought-provoking book is directed principally to the question: ‘Are simple mathematical models helpful in economics, or are they misleading?’ His answer, baldly stated, is that if they are made right they are helpful, but if they are made wrong they are misleading.

He has in mind an ideal reader: someone who already knows from other fields how a successful theory based on formal mathematical models works, but who has only recently stumbled on economics, and is skeptical about formal mathematical models here. I am not quite an ideal reader now, but I was once, because I studied and worked in physics before going into economics.

We present the first comprehensive theory of fairness that conceives of fairness as having two dimensions: a comparative and an absolute one. The comparative dimension of fairness has traditionally been the main interest of Broomean fairness theories. It has been analysed as satisfying competing individual claims in proportion to their respective strengths. And yet, many key contributors to Broomean fairness agree that ‘absolute’ fairness is important as well. We make this concern precise by introducing the Fairness formula and the absolute priority rule and analyse their implications for comparative fairness.

This article refines a foundational tenet of rational choice theory known as the principle of description invariance. Attempts to apply this principle to human agents with imperfect knowledge have paid insufficient attention to two aspects: first, agents’ epistemic situations, i.e. whether and when they recognize alternative descriptions of an object to be equivalent; and second, the individuation of objects of description, i.e. whether and when objects count as the same or different. An important consequence is that many apparent ‘framing effects’ may not violate the principle of description invariance, and the subjects of these effects may not be irrational.