It is a commonplace of academic conventional wisdom that Marxian theory is not to be judged by the historical experience of actually existing socialist societies. The reasons given in support of this view are familiar enough, but let us rehearse them. Born in adversity, encircled by hostile powers, burdened with the necessity of defending themselves against foreign enemies and with the massive task of educating backward and reactionary populations, the revolutionary socialist governments of this century were each of them denied any real opportunity to implement Marxian socialism in its authentic form. Nowhere has socialism come to power as Marx expected it would – on the back of the organized proletariat of an advanced capitalist society. For this reason, the historical experience of the past sixty years can have no final authority in the assessment of Marxian theory. The failings of Marxist regimes – their domination by bureaucratic elites, their economic crises, their repression of popular movements and of intellectual freedoms, and their dependency on imports of Western technology and capital – are all to be explained as historical contingencies which in no way threaten the validity of Marx's central conceptions. It is not that Marxian socialism has been tried and found wanting but, rather, that it has never been tried.

The socialist calculation debate is a debate about whether rational economic decisions can be made without markets, or without markets in production goods. Though this debate has been simmering in economics for over 65 years, most philosophers have ignored it. This may be because they are unaware of the debate, or perhaps it is because they have absorbed the conventional view that one side decisively won. This is the side represented by economists such as Oskar Lange and Fred Taylor who, in opposition to free-market economists like Fredrich Hayek, allegedly showed that their version of market socialism is, in principle, as efficient as capitalism.

Marx believed that what most clearly distinguished him and Engels from the nineteenth-century French socialists was that their version (or vision) of socialism was “scientific” while the latters' was Utopian. What he intended by this contrast is roughly the following: French socialists such as Proudhon and Fourier constructed elaborate visions of a future socialist society without an adequate understanding of existing capitalist society. For Marx, on the other hand, socialism was not an idea or an ideal to be realized, but a natural outgrowth of the existing capitalist order. Marx's historical materialism is a systematic attempt to discover the laws governing the inner dynamics of capitalism and class societies generally. Although this theory issues in a prediction of the ultimate triumph of socialism, it is a commonplace that Marx had little to say about the details of post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, some of its features can be discerned from his critical analysis of capitalism and what its replacement entails.

The main objective of this essay is to show that the process of transition from socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe is a cultural problem rather than a technical one. In pursuing that objective I analyze two interrelated issues. First, analysis shows why and how cultural differences in Central and Eastern Europe have, via transaction costs specific to the process of transition, specific and predictable effects on the results of institutional restructuring, and, consequently, on economic performance. Second, I argue that spontaneous changes in the prevailing culture could, under a set of credible and stable formal rules of the game, help to close a gap between the culture supportive of capitalism and the prevailing culture in Central and Eastern Europe.My colleague and friend Fred Fransen made two major contributions to this essay: he helped me identify numerous inconsistencies in the essay, and he changed a number of my perceptions on the relationship between culture and economic performance. James Buchanan, Ljubo Madzar, Henry Manne, Milic Milovanovic, and Katarina Ott gave me useful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts. I am grateful to Victor Vanberg and Ulrich Witt for the opportunity to discuss this essay with their colleagues and students at the University of Freiburg and Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany.

It seems to be almost a given of contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy that the just society is obligated to establish and ensure the equality of its members. Debate begins when we come to delineate the forms and limits of the equality society is obligated to underwrite. In this essay I offer the subversive suggestion that equality is not something the just society should aim for. Instead I offer another objective, one which is to be preferred both because it is more attainable and because it is morally more defensible than equality, either as an ideal or as an operative principle. The demand for equality of treatment, of opportunity, or of outcome, is a distraction from morally more significant aims.

Some understand utopia as an ideal society in which everyone would be thoroughly informed by a moral ethos: all would always act on their pure conscientious judgments about justice, and so it would never be necessary to provide incentives for them to act as justice requires. In this essay I argue that such a society is impossible. A society of purely conscientiously just agents would be unable to achieve real justice. This is the Paradox of Pure Conscientiousness. This paradox, I argue, can only be overcome when individuals are prepared to depart from their own pure, conscientious, judgments of justice.

The environment has often been thought to consist of resources that are unowned, and hence subject to the well-known tragedy of the commons. But in recent years, property ideas have been increasingly recruited for environmental protection, in a manner that appears to vindicate the view that property rights evolve along with the needs for resource management. Nevertheless, property regimes have some pitfalls for environmental resources: the relevant parties may not be able to come to agreement; property regimes may be weak or ineffective; they may be aimed at purposes inconsistent with environmental protection; property rights definitions may not work well for environmental resources; modern property regimes may promote monoculture rather than diverse environments. This essay describes these problems and asks to what degree they apply to a new effort to use property rights approaches, namely cap-and-trade programs to control greenhouse gases. It concludes that property rights, while imperfect and something of a retreat from a regime of complete liberty, may offer gains for environmental protection. But success will depend on close attention to the accountability and effectiveness of the governmental institutions necessary to support environmental property regimes.

There is a widespread feeling that health is special; the rules that are usually used in other policy areas are not applied in health policy. Health economists, for example, tend to be reluctant to offer economists' usual prescription of competition and consumer choice, even though they have largely failed to justify this reluctance by showing that health economics involves special features such as public goods, externalities, adverse selection, poor consumer information, or unusually severe consequences.

Contemporary global governance is organized around an odd pairing: care and control. On the one hand, much of global governance is designed to reduce human suffering and improve human flourishing, with the important caveat that individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves how they want to live their lives. On the other hand, these global practices of care are also entangled with acts of control. Peacebuilding, public health, emergency aid, human rights, and development are expressions of this tension between care and control. There is a concept that captures this tension: paternalism. Drawing on our moral intuitions, I argue that paternalism is the attempt by one actor to substitute his judgment for another actor's on the grounds that such an imposition will improve the welfare of the target actor. After discussing and defending this definition, I note how our unease with paternalism seems to grow as we scale up from the interpersonal to the international, which I argue owes to the evaporation of community and equality. After exploring the implications of this definition and distinguishing it from other forms of intervention, I consider how different elements of paternalism combine to generate different configurations. Specifically, I point to five dimensions that are most relevant for examining the paternalism found in contemporary global and humanitarian governance: the tools used to restrict another actor’s liberty (force versus information); the scope of the interference (wide versus narrow); the purpose of the intervention (prevention of harm versus emancipation); the source of the paternalizer’s confidence (faith versus evidence); and the mechanisms of accountability (internal versus external). These different elements often correlate historically, suggestive of two ideal types of global paternalism: strong and weak. Contemporary global and humanitarian governance is largely the weak variety: force is severely proscribed, interference is relatively restricted, the paternalizer’s confidence has epistemic roots, and accountability to local populations remains a noble but rarely practiced goal. I further speculate that a major reason for this difference is the effects of liberalism and rationalization. I use this taxonomy to suggest how two different global efforts to improve the lives of those peoples living in what were perceived to be unstable and illiberal territories — the civilizing missions of the nineteenth century and the peacebuilding operations of the post-Cold War period — exhibited different kinds of paternalism. I conclude by reflecting on the ethics of international paternalism.

There are no first principles etched in stone from which all moral philosophers must take their bearings. We must deliberately choose our point of departure in any attempt to respond to the question: “Must any defensible theory of justice incorporate both a commitment to personal liberty and to economic equality?” Basic to our own approach is a suspicion of seers and visionaries who espy an external source of values independent from human choices. We presuppose, instead, that political philosophy commences with individual evaluation.1 A near-corollary of this presupposition is that each individual's preferences ought to be taken into account equally with those of others. That is, we suppose that there is no privileged evaluator, whose preferences are accorded decisive weight. Conceptual unanimity as a criterion for institutional evaluation follows naturally from the other two presuppositions. If there is neither an external standard of value nor a corps of resident value experts, only unanimity can ultimately be satisfactory as a test of social desirability. Our perspective then is subjectivist, individualist, and unanimitarian.

These presuppositions inform our contractarian analysis. There are, however, two separate contractarian traditions that we shall find useful to distinguish, the “Hobbesian” and the “Rawlsian.” In the first, persons find themselves in the anarchistic war of each against all. They contract away their natural liberties in exchange for the order that civil society – through its sovereign – affords. In this contracting process, individuals are assumed to possess full self-knowledge; they know who they are, what conceptions of the good they hold, and what their endowments are.

What role, if any, should our moral intuitions play in moral epistemology? We make, or are prepared to make, moral judgments about a variety of actual and hypothetical situations. Some of these moral judgments are more informed, reflective, and stable than others (call these our considered moral judgments); some we make more confidently than others; and some, though not all, are judgments about which there is substantial consensus. What bearing do our moral judgments have on philosophical ethics and the search for first principles in ethics? Should these judgments constrain, or be constrained by, philosophical theorizing about morality? On the one hand, we might expect first principles to conform to our moral intuitions or at least to our considered moral judgments. After all, we begin the reflection that may lead to first principles from particular moral convictions. And some of our moral intuitions (e.g., that genocide is wrong) are more fixed and compelling than any putative first principle. If so, we might expect common moral beliefs to have an important evidential role in the construction and assessment of first principles. On the other hand, common moral beliefs often rest on poor information, reflect bias, or are otherwise mistaken. We often appeal to moral principles to justify our particular moral convictions or to resolve our disagreements. Insofar as this is true, we may expect first principles to provide a foundation on the basis of which to test common moral beliefs and, where necessary, form new moral convictions.

The primary purpose of this essay is to offer a critique of a particular program within moral and political philosophy. This program can be stated quite succinctly. It is to account for agents' being subject to deontic restrictions on the basis of their possession of agent-relative reasons for acting in accordance with those restrictions. Needless to say, the statement of this program requires some further explication. Specifically, two claims require explanation: (1) the reasons individuals have for or against engaging in particular actions are, at least to a very significant extent, agent-relative rather than agent-neutral; and (2) agents' conduct toward others is subject to deontic restrictions. Finally, (3) I need to explain why an agent's possession of agent-relative reasons for performing or refraining from certain actions may be thought to explain that agent's being subject to certain deontic restrictions.

According to one long-standing tradition, the organizing question of ethics is “What are we morally obligated to do?” However, many philosophers, inspired by an even older tradition, now urge a return to the question “What kind of person is it best to be?” According to these philosophers, the proper locus of evaluation is character rather than action, and the basic evaluative concept is virtue rather than duty. Following what has become common usage, I shall refer to the first approach as “duty ethics” and to the second as “virtue ethics.”

In this essay I describe how contractarianism might approach interspecies welfare conflicts. I start by discussing a contractarian account of the moral status of nonhuman animals. I argue that contractors can agree to norms that would acknowledge the “moral standing” of some animals. I then discuss how the norms emerging from contractarian agreement might constrain any comparison of welfare between humans and animals. Contractarian agreement is likely to express some partiality to humans in a way that discounts the welfare of some or all animals. While the norms emerging from the contract might be silent or inconsistent in some tragic or catastrophic cases, in most ordinary conflicts of welfare, contractors will agree to norms that produce some determinate resolution. What the agreement says can evolve depending upon how the contractors or the circumstances change. I close with some remarks on contractarian indeterminacy.

I begin with a note about moral goodness as a quality, disposition, or trait of a person or human being. This has at least two different senses, one wider and one narrower. Aristotle remarked that the Greek term we translate as justice sometimes meant simply virtue or goodness as applied to a person and sometimes meant only a certain virtue or kind of goodness. The same thing is true of our word “goodness.” Sometimes being a good person means having all the virtues, or at least all the moral ones; then goodness equals the whole of virtue. But sometimes, being a good person has a narrower meaning, namely, being kind, generous, and so forth. Thus, my OED sometimes equates goodness with moral excellence as a whole and sometimes with a particular moral excellence, viz., kindness, beneficence, or benevolence; and the Bible, when it speaks of God as being good sometimes means that God has all the virtues and sometimes only that he is kind, mereiful, or benevolent. When Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good: None is good, save one, that is God,” he seems to be speaking of goodness in the inclusive sense, but when the writer of Exodus has God himself say that he is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” God is using “goodness” in the narrower sense in which it means benevolence, for he goes on to make it clear that he is also just and severe. Similarly, “good will” may mean either “morally good will” in general, as it does in Kant, or it may mean only “benevolent will,” as it usually does; in “men of good will” it is perhaps ambiguous.

A surprising conclusion of modern political economy is that democracies with highly ignorant voters can still deliver very good results as long as voters' errors balance each other out. This result is known as the Miracle of Aggregation. This paper begins by reviewing a large body of evidence against this Miracle. Empirically, voters' errors tend to be systematic; they compound rather than cancel. Furthermore, since most citizens vote for the policies they believe are best for society, systematic errors lead voters to support socially suboptimal policies. The paper then considers the case for “paternalistically” vetoing popular but misguided democratic decisions, presenting several arguments that overruling democratic decisions is much less objectionable than overruling individual decisions. In fact, since democracies routinely adopt paternalistic policies, the opponent of paternalism for individual decisions should embrace paternalism for democratic decisions. The paper concludes by considering several different mechanisms for improving upon majority rule.

My goal in this essay is to say something helpful about the philosophical foundations of deontic restraints, i.e., moral restraints on actions that are, roughly speaking, grounded in the wrongful character of the actions themselves and not merely in the disvalue of their results. An account of deontic restraints will be formulated and offered against the backdrop of three related, but broader, contrasts or puzzles within moral theory. The plausibility of this account of deontic restraints (and of the conception of moral rights which are correlative to these restraints) rests in part on how well this account resolves the puzzles or illuminates the contrasts which make up this theoretical backdrop.

Ideal theorists in political philosophy seek to describe a perfect political society, and to evaluate political principles by reference to their consequences in a world where everyone complies with the principles. I argue that ideal theory is not needed to set goals for practical inquiries, nor to define justice, nor to enable rankings of injustices. Nor is it useful to theorize about very different kinds of society that might occur in the far future. Ideal theory tempts us to make each of three kinds of error: it tempts us to propose norms that no specific agent can act on, to posit crazy exaggerations of moral virtues, and to place too much trust in abstract philosophical reasoning. A better approach to normative questions is to rely on analogical arguments starting from uncontroversial intuitions about concrete scenarios.

The essay argues that while there is no general agreement on whether moral realism is true, there is general agreement on at least some of the moral obligations that we have if moral realism is true. Given that moral realism might be true, and given that we know some of the things we ought to do if it is true, we have a reason to do those things. Furthermore, this reason is itself an objective moral reason. Thus, if moral realism might be true, then it is true.

Neuroscience is commonly thought to challenge the basic way we think of ourselves in ordinary thought, morality, and the law. This paper: (1) describes the legal institutions challenged in this way by neuroscience, including in that description both the political philosophy such institutions enshrine and the common sense psychology they presuppose; (2) describes the three kinds of data produced by contemporary neuroscience that is thought to challenge these commonsense views of ourselves in morals and law; and (3) distinguishes four major and several minor kinds of challenges that that data can reasonably be interpreted to present. The major challenges are: first, the challenge of reductionism, that we are merely machines; second, the challenge of determinism, that we are caused to choose and act as we do by brain states that we do not control; third, the challenge of epiphenomenalism, that our choices do not cause our actions because our brains are the real cause of those actions; and fourth, the challenge of fallibilism, that we do not have direct access to those of our mental states that do cause our actions, nor are we infallible in such knowledge as we do have of them.