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Prospects for the Elimination of Tastes from Economics and Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Alexander Rosenberg
Alexander Rosenberg
Affiliation:
Philosophy and Social Sciences, Syracuse University
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Extract

De gustibus non est disputandum. This maxim reflects a fundamental problem both for the study of markets and for the concern with morals. The problem is the intractability of tastes coupled with their indispensability for both positive and normative economics. Tastes are indispensable in positive microeconomic theory because, under the label ‘preferences,’ they, together with expectations, determine choice and behavior. Tastes are equally indispensable to welfare economics' conception of morally permissible arrangements, because these arrangements must reflect compromises between competing and conflicting preferences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Spring 1985 , pp. 48 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1985

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References

1 Becker, Gary, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).Google Scholar All page references to Becker in the text are to this work.

2 Together with that of Lancaster, K. J., “A New Approach to Consumer Theory,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 72 (1966), pp.132–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 ibid., p. 14. For many of these applications, see Becker, , Human Behavior, and his more recent Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

4 Ramsey, Frank, Foundations of Mathematics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1931),Google Scholar Chapter 3, “Truth and Probability.”

5 The bearing of “holism” about the mental on these issues is spelled out in Davidson, Donald, “Philosophy as Psychology,” in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.229–238.Google Scholar To see the role which such assumptions have come explicity to have in experimental psychology, see Rachlin, Howard, “Maximization Theory in Behavioral Psychology,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 4 (1981), pp.371–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Hicks, Sir John, Value and Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 11.Google Scholar

7 I describe it as a rearrangement because, as Becker admits, the conventional exposition of the theory of consumer behavior is derivable from his, although it will contain items in the utility function quite foreign to the conventional theory. See Human Behavior, p. 146.

8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 13.

9 This is an ethical prescription which, as Samuelson puts it, “stems from the individualist philosophy of modern Western Civilization,… that individual preferences are to count.” Samuelson, Paul A., Foundations of Economic Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 223.Google Scholar

10 “Repressive Tolerance,” in Wolff, R.P., Moore, B., Marcuse, H., Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), p. 111Google ScholarPubMed, emphasis added.

11 This point is made, perhaps to excess, in Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).Google Scholar

12 Bentham, Jeremy, “Anarchical Fallacies,” Collected Papers, reprinted in Meldin, A.I., ed., Human Rights (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970), p. 32.Google Scholar

13 Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 505f.Google Scholar Page references to Rawls in the text are to this work.

14 I owe thanks to J. Evinsky, J. Kidder, D. Hausman, R. J. Wolfson, and especially Gary Becker, for useful comments on a previous version of this paper. The current version reflects valuable suggestions by Hal Varian and helpful discussion by Amartya Sen, Allan Gibbard, Jules Coleman, Donald Regan and Jeffrey Paul at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center's conference on Morals and Markets. No agreement with my views, however, should be attributed to these persons, and remaining errors of economics or interpretation are entirely my own.