Wednesday, December 17, 2003

On economic theory Posted here Wednesday, December 17, 2003 at 11:59:10 AM     Overheard, for purposes of comment: ..all of communism, socialism, liberalism, and libertarianism as in pretty much the same boat philosophically and from the perspective of the ideal society that each would see. They all favor the greatest wealth for the most amount of people; they are all, in this conception, materialist and utilitarian philosophically. They just have had different factual conceptions of the world about how this would be achieved practically, and somewhat different conceptions of wealth ethically. Conservatism, by way of contrast, ..emphasizes a supernal or divine source of morality in the universe. Like much debate these days, the positons are falsely divided. The choice betwen a materialist or a diest view of goodness leaves out a human development view that is complex, biological and spiritual. comment: the contrast is not the more interesting. The greatest good for the most can be got by simply doubling the number of people and decresing their pleasure by a third. Soemthing more must be going on to make this argument plausible. Some richer conception of human nature is the obvious candidate. As Nussbaum says in her Poetic Justice, "My proposal is a more modest one, that economic science should be built • on human data of the sort novels such as Dickens's reveal to the imaginat:ion, that economic science should seek a more complicated and philosophically adequate set of foundations. " Page 11 ********