Economics with(out) ethics? An interdisciplinary encounter between public economists and John Rawls in the 1970s

Danielle Guizzo and Carles Paré-Ogg

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2023, vol. 30, issue 5, 906-933

Abstract: This article analyses selected interdisciplinary exchanges between analytical political philosophy and public economics in the United States during the 1970s. It focuses on three core themes in which public economists interpreted, discussed, and incorporated concepts from John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), namely: (1) the limits and uses of utilitarianism as a useful framework for capturing social welfare; (2) the ethics of promoting justice and fairness; and (3) how to promote redistribution through taxation. An exploration of published and unpublished sources (personal correspondence, articles, and books) following the publication of Rawls’s magnum opus reveals an intense engagement from public economists with key Rawlsian concepts in the 1970s, in particular the “maximin.” Whilst such exchange offered important thematic inspiration for making the field more ethically driven and engaged with justice-related issues, generating policy discussions on promoting redistribution through optimal taxation, their exchange remained within the economist’s formal toolbox and way of reasoning. Political philosophy made public economics to become ethical without challenging the core epistemic-methodological foundations of economic reasoning.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2023.2248321 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:30:y:2023:i:5:p:906-933

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2023.2248321

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().