Why is (it that) common priors are implicit or explicit in the vast majority of the differential information literature in economics and game theory? Why has the economic community been unwilling, in practice, to accept and actually use the idea of truly personal probabilities in much the same way that it did accept the idea of personal utility functions? After all, in (Savage's expected utility theory), both the utilities and probabilities are derived separately for each decision maker. Why were the utilities accepted as personal, and the probabilities not?

It is universally agreed that involuntary unemployment is an evil for unemployed individuals, who lose both income and the non-pecuniary benefits of paid employment, and for society, which loses the productive labor that the unemployed are unable to expend. It is nearly as widely agreed that there is at least a prima-facie case for alleviating this evil – for reasons of justice and/or benevolence and/or social order. Finally, there is little doubt that the evils of involuntary unemployment cannot be adequately addressed in contemporary societies without state intervention – whether through monetary or fiscal policies, cash payments or other subsidies to the unemployed, direct provision of employment by the state, or some combination of these measures.

Roemer has a striking and novel criticism of Marx's thesis that capitalism is exploitative. Even if so, Roemer claims, that does not establish that it is morally objectionable. He argues from idealized models that involve what he calls ‘Marxian exploitation’, but do not have the consequences which, he says, Marxists think make exploitation bad – domination, alienation, and inequality – or have them only in unobjectionable ways. These models, Roemer thinks, show that the moral problem with capitalism that Marxian exploitation locates only imperfectly is unjust inequality. He develops an alternative notion of ‘property relations exploitation’, based on this charge, to replace the morally uninteresting notion of Marxian exploitation in assessing arguments for socialism.

In his book A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982) (hereafter GT), John Roemer employs the tools of mainstream general equilibrium and game-theoretic analysis to develop a fundamental critique and broadbased reformulation of Marxian economic theory. Perhaps Roemer's most striking departure from traditional Marxian tenets lies in his explanation of the material basis of exploitation in capitalist economies. Roemer argues that capitalist exploitation must be understood as essentially the consequence of exchange given differential ownership of relatively scarce productive assets (DORSPA). In particular, Roemer concludes that capitalist exploitation does not fundamentally depend on capitalist domination of production, or what Marx termed the subsumption of labor under capital.

This paper is about the relevance, to the definition of freedom, of values or goods other than freedom. In this respect,its subject matter is not at all new. However, I do believe that new light can be thrown on the nature of this relationship by paying more attention to another relationship – one which exists within the concept of freedom itself. There are two senses in which we can be said to possess freedom. Firstly, there is the sense in which we can be said to be free to do a certain particular thing. Secondly,there is the sense in which we can be said to possess a certain ‘amount’,‘degree’ or ‘quantity’ of freedom, in some overall sense.1 I believe that most recent accounts of the relationship between freedom and other goods are inconsistent, because they see those other goods as affecting the truth value of claims about freedom in the second sense, but not in the first.

The prisoner 's dilemma game (henceforth, PD) has acquired large literatures in several disciplines. It is surprising, therefore, that a good definition of the game is hard to find. Typically an author relates a story about captured criminals or military rivals, provides a particular payoff matrix and asserts that the PD is characterized, or illustrated, by that matrix. In the few cases in which characterizing conditions are given, the conditions, and the motivations for them, do not always agree with each other or with the paradigm examples elsewhere. In this paper we describe several varieties of PD's. In particular, we suggest there are two distinctions among PD's with philosophical significance, the pure/impure and the utilitarian/nonutilitarian distinctions. In the first section, we explain and characterize the two distinctions. In the second, we discuss an issue of moral philosophy that illustrates the significance of the former.

John Rawls's work (1971) has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony,particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality (Dworkin 1981a,b), and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on ‘Equality of What?’ thus deals with what variables ought to be submitted for selection and how this selection ought to be carried out.

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.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to think about rationality, as defined in the following passage: ‘Reason’ for a long time meant the activity of understanding and assimilating the eternal ideas which were to function as goals for men. Today, on the contrary, it is not only the business but the essential work of reason to find means for the goals one adopts at any given time. (Horkheimer, 1974, p. vii) To use what Horkheimer called objective reason, and what others have called expressive or non–instrumental reason, is to reflect on one's goals, to attempt to determine what preferences one ought to hold. On the other hand, to use what Horkheimer called subjective reason is to ‘be concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted’ (1947, p. 3), that is, to be instrumentally rational. This contrast between non-instrumental and instrumental reason is at the heart of many contemporary social and philosophical disputes.1

Difficult moral issues in economic life, such as evaluating the impact of hostile takeovers and plant relocations or determining the obligations of business to the environment, constitute the raison d'etre of business ethics. Yet, while the ultimate resolution of such issues clearly requires detailed, normative analysis, a shortcoming of business ethics is that to date it has failed to develop an adequate normative theory.1 The failing is especially acute when it results in an inability to provide a basis for fine-grained analyses of issues. Both general moral theories and stakeholder theory seem incapable of expressing the moral complexity necessary to provide practical normative guidance for many business ethics contexts.

Most philosophical accounts of the foundations of economics have assumed that economics is intended to be an empirical science concerned with human behaviour, though they have, of course, differed over the extent to which it has been or can be successful as such an enterprise. A prominent source of dissent against this consensus is Alexander Rosenberg. In his recent book, Rosenberg summarizes and completes his statement of a position that he has been developing for some time (Rosenberg, 1992a). He argues that although economists evaluate one another's work according to shared and rigorous standards of adequacy, these standards are strictly internal, like those of mathematics, instead of being derived from discoveries about contingent relationships between theoretical statements and empirical facts. Economics, that is to say, is essentially conceptual rather than empirical inquiry. In the following discussion, I will provide grounds for resisting Rosenberg's conclusion. The point of this criticism, however, is not mainly negative. Most of the historical preoccupations of the philosophy of economics, like those of the philosophy of science in general, have been epistemological. Careful attention to Rosenberg's argument, however, redirects our attention to ontological questions about the objects of economics, and this redirection, I will maintain, is to be welcomed. I will argue that while the majority of philosophers of economics is correct, as against Rosenberg, in regarding economics as an empirical science, the conventional view as to the identity of its empirical objects should be substantially revised under the pressure of Rosenberg's criticisms. My critical analysis of the implications of Rosenberg's work for the ontological commitments of economics is intended to furnish one line of argument towards my own conception of the objects of economics. This conception, which is still preliminary in many respects, will be briefly sketched toward the end of the present paper; a detailed account of it is given in Ross and LaCasse (1993).

Alexander Rosenberg has played a large role in creating the philosophy of economics as a distinct area of philosophy. But since the publication of Microeconomic Laws in 1976, Professor Rosenberg's thinking about economics has been casting the subject in an increasingly uncomplimentary light. This development is reflected in Rosenberg's new book Economics–Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? In this stimulating work Rosenberg endorses the view that economics does not constitute scientific empirical knowledge. He says:

In his recent book, Economics – Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns, Alexander Rosenberg has offered a forceful critique of the scientific pretensions of economics. I am encouraged to note that in his JEL review, Wade Hands (1993) singles out Rosenberg's ‘important discussion of intentionality’ as one of the most significant aspects of the book. Encouraged, because this was exactly my impression, and Hands's judgment confirmed my intention to respond to Rosenberg's argument. I hope, however, to be able to disappoint Hands's expectation that this aspect of Rosenberg's work ‘will be least challenged by economists’!