The Market and Public Choices: An Ethical Assessment

This text assumes a viewpoint practically absent from contemporary economics and readdresses the first fundamental question of economics: how should we decide how scarce resources should be allocated among competing uses? By focusing on this question the book necessarily reconstitutes the link between ethics and economics. Thus the book deals with a crucial topic: the moral assessment of the market mechanism as a tool for allocating scarce resources. The key tenet of the book is that the market achieves ends that transcends itself - ends that must remain the prerogative of civil society. Questions of the foundations of moral philosophy are considered - allocating scarce resources is shown to be an exclusively human capacity, which means that the market is unable to determine such issues endogenously. An intuitionist approach to moral philosophy is developed and this is placed in the context of the history of Western moral philosophy. The argument encompasses mathematical logic, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy and economics.