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

Danielle Guizzo*, Carles Paré-Ogg*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

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 An exploration of published and unpublished sources (personal correspondence, articles, and books) following the publication of Rawls’s magnum opus reveals an intense engagement from public economists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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)906-933
Number of pages28
JournalEuropean Journal of the History of Economic Thought
Volume30
Issue number5
Early online date31 Aug 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Aug 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, Marianne Johnson, and Richard Sturn for their useful comments on earlier versions of this article, as well as the participants and organisers of the “From Public Finance to Public Economics” Workshop at the Graz-Schumpeter Centre (University of Graz, Austria) in September 2022, as well as the comments from two anonymous referees. We also thank the Harvard University Archives for kindly providing us with the Rawls Archives, as well as Alicja Kobayashi for assistance with archival research. The usual disclaimers apply.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

  • analytical political philosophy
  • ethics
  • interdisciplinarity
  • John Rawls
  • Public economics
  • redistribution
  • utilitarianism

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