The concept of the individual and his/her motivations is a bedrock of philosophy. All strands of thought at heart contain to a particular theory of the individual. Economics, though, is guilty of taking this hugely important concept without questioning how we theorize it. This superb book remedies this oversight. The new approach put forward by Davies is to pay more attention to what moral philosophy may offer us in the study of personal identity, self consciousness and will. This crosses the (...) traditional boundaries of economics and will shed new light on the distinction between positive and normative analysis in economics. With both heterodox and orthodox economics receiving a thorough analysis from Davies, this book is at once inclusive and revealing. (shrink)

This book examines the different conceptions of the individual that have emerged in recent new approaches in economics, including behavioral economics, experimental economics, social preferences approaches, game theory, neuroeconomics, evolutionary and complexity economics, and the capability approach. These conceptions are classified according to whether they seek to revise the traditional atomist individual conception, put new emphasis on interaction and relations between individuals, account for individuals as evolving and self-organizing, and explain individuals in terms of capabilities. The method of analysis uses (...) two identity criteria for distinguishing and re-identifying individuals to determine whether these different individual conceptions successfully identify individuals. Successful individual conceptions account for sub-personal and supra-personal bounds on single individual explanations. The former concerns the fragmentation of individuals into multiple selves; the latter concerns the dissolution of individuals into the social. The book develops an understanding of bounded individuality, seen as central to the defense of human rights. (shrink)

Relativism and contextualism are the most popular accounts of faultless disagreement, but Crispin Wright once argued for an account I call divergentism. According to divergentism, parties who possess all relevant information and use the same standards of assessment in the same context of utterance can disagree about the same proposition without either party being in epistemic fault, yet only one of them is right. This view is an alternative to relativism, indexical contextualism, and nonindexical contextualism, and has advantages over those (...) views. Wright eventually abandoned this view in favor of relativism for reasons related to a conciliationist view of disagreement between epistemic peers. I argue that he gave up on divergentism too soon. (shrink)

Bioethicists are widely agreed that patients have a right of self-determination over how they are treated. Our duty to respect this is said to be based on the principle of respect for autonomy. In end-of-life care the patient may be incompetent and unable to exercise that right. One solution is to exercise it in advance. Advance directives, which include living wills and powers of attorney for health care, enable people to decide what medical treatment they will receive later, when they (...) become incompetent. Advance directives have been criticized in two general ways. First, many critics contend that advance directives fail on a practical level to effect a patient's autonomous choices because, for example, people cannot foresee their futures well enough to make informed decisions in advance. Second, many critics contend that, practical problems aside, there is no moral authority for exercising control over one's incompetent future self. (shrink)

Honoring a living will typically involves treating an incompetent patient in accord with preferences she once had, but whose objects she can no longer understand. How do we respect her precedent autonomy by giving her what she used to want? There is a similar problem with subsequent consent: How can we justify interfering with someone''s autonomy on the grounds that she will later consent to the interference, if she refuses now?Both problems arise on the assumption that, to respect someone''s autonomy, (...) any preferences we respect must be among that person''s current preferences. I argue that this is not always true. Just as we can celebrate an event long after it happens, so can we respect someone''s wishes long before or after she has that wish. In the contexts of precedent autonomy and subsequent consent, the wishes are often preferences about which of two other, conflicting preferences to satisfy. When someone has two conflicting preferences, and a third preference on how to resolve that conflict, to respect his autonomy we must respect that third preference. People with declining competence may have a resolution preference earlier, favoring the earlier conflicting preference (precedent autonomy), whereas those with rising competence may have it later, favoring the later conflicting preference (subsequent consent). To respect autonomy in such cases we must respect not a current, but a former or later preference. (shrink)

Patients sometimes request procedures their doctors find morally objectionable. Do doctors have a right of conscientious refusal? I argue that conscientious refusal is justified only if the doctor's refusal does not make the patient worse off than she would have been had she gone to another doctor in the first place. From this approach I derive conclusions about the duty to refer and facilitate transfer, whether doctors may provide 'moral counseling,' whether doctors are obligated to provide objectionable procedures when no (...) other doctor is available, why the moral consensus among doctors seems relevant even though it does not determine whether something is morally acceptable, and whether doctors should stay out of fields whose standard procedures they find morally unacceptable. (shrink)

Sometimes the mentally ill have sufficient mental capacity to refuse treatment competently, and others have a moral duty to respect their refusal. However, those with episodic mental disorders may wish to precommit themselves to treatment, using Ulysses contracts known as “mental health advance directives.” How can health care providers justify enforcing such contracts over an agent’s current, competent refusal? I argue that providers respect an agent’s autonomy not retrospectively—by reference to his or her past wishes—and not merely synchronically—so that the (...) agent gets what he or she wants right now—but diachronically and prospectively, acting so that the agent can shape his or her circumstances as the agent wishes over time, for the agent will experience the consequences of providers’ actions over time. Mental health directives accomplish this, so they are a way of respecting the agent’s autonomy even when providers override the agent’s current competent refusal. (shrink)

Moral and legal judgments sometimes depend on personal traits in this sense: the subject offers good reasons for her judgment, but if she had a different social or ideological background, her judgment would be different. If you would judge the constitutionality of restrictions on abortion differently if you were not a secular liberal, is your judgment really based on the arguments you find convincing, or do you find them so only because you are a secular liberal? I argue that a (...) judgment can be based on the considerations the subject claims as justification even when it depends on personal traits. (shrink)

Some moral disagreements are so persistent that we suspect they are deep : we would disagree even when we have all relevant information and no one makes any mistakes. The possibility of deep disagreement is thought to drive cognitivists toward relativism, but most cognitivists reject relativism. There is an alternative. According to divergentism, cognitivists can reject relativism while allowing for deep disagreement. This view has rarely been defended at length, but many philosophers have implicitly endorsed its elements. I will defend (...) it. (shrink)

The worst possible way to resolve this issue is to leave it up to individual choice. There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death (Bailey, 1999). - Daniel Callahan Dramatically extending the human lifespan seems increasingly possible. Many bioethicists object that life-extension will have Malthusian consequences as new Methuselahs accumulate, generation by generation. I argue for a Life-Years Response to the Malthusian Objection. If even a minority of each generation chooses life-extension, denying it to them deprives (...) them of many years of extra life, and their total extra life-years are likely to exceed the total life-years of a majority who do not want life-extension. This is a greater harm to those who want extended life than the Malthusian harms to those who refuse extended life, both because losing an extra year of life is worse than enduring a year of Malthusian conditions, and because the would-be Methuselahs have more life-years at stake. Therefore, even if life-extension seems likely to cause severe overcrowding and resource shortages, that threat is not sufficient to justify society in restricting the development or availability of life-extension. (shrink)

Moral decision procedures such as principlism or casuistry require intuition at certain junctures, as when a principle seems indeterminate, or principles conflict, or we wonder which paradigm case is most relevantly similar to the instant case. However, intuitions are widely thought to lack epistemic justification, and many ethicists urge that such decision procedures dispense with intuition in favor of forms of reasoning that provide discursive justification. I argue that discursive justification does not eliminate or minimize the need for intuition, or (...) constrain our intuitions. However, this is not a problem, for intuitions can be justified in easy or obvious cases, and decision procedures should be understood as heuristic devices for reaching judgments about harder cases that approximate the justified intuitions we would have about cases under ideal conditions, where hard cases become easy. Similarly, the forms of reasoning which provide discursive justification help decision procedures perform this heuristic function not by avoiding intuition, but by making such heuristics more accurate. Nonetheless, it is possible to demand too much justification; many clinical ethicists lack the time and philosophical training to reach the more elaborate levels of discursive justification. We should keep moral decision procedures simple and user-friendly so that they will provide what justification can be achieved under clinical conditions, rather than trying to maximize our epistemic justification out of an overstated concern about intuition. (shrink)

Read this excellent collection of informative papers in the field to stimulate your ow the field and readers interested in the nature of the discipline of ...

Human development is meant to be transformational in that it aims to improve people's lives by enhancing their capabilities. But who does it target: people as they are or the people they will become? This paper argues that the human development approach relies on an understanding of personal identity as dynamic rather than as static collections of preferences, and that this distinguishes human development from conventional approaches to development. Nevertheless, this dynamic understanding of personal identity is presently poorly conceptualized and (...) this has implications for development practice. We identify a danger of paternalism and propose institutionalizing two procedural principles as side constraints on development policies and projects: the principle of free prior informed consent and the principle of democratic development. -/- . (shrink)

In this compelling book, John B. Davis examines the change and development in Keynes's philosophical thinking, from his earliest work through to The General Theory, arguing that Keynes came to believe himself mistaken about a number of his early philosophical concepts. The author begins by looking at the unpublished 'Apostles' papers, written under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore. These display the tensions in Keynes's early philosophical views, and outline his philosophical concepts of the time, including the concept (...) of intuition. Davis then shows how Keynes's later philosophy is implicit in the economic argument of The General Theory. He argues that Keynes's philosophy had by this time changed radically, and that he had abandoned the concept of intuition for the concept of convention. The author sees this as being the central idea in The General Theory, and looks at the philosophical nature of this concept of convention in detail. (shrink)

A growing number of patients make up their minds about some medical issue before they see their provider, either by googling their symptoms or asking a friend. They’ve made up their minds before coming in, and they resist their provider’s recommendations even after receiving information and advice from their provider. This is a new kind of medical autonomy problem; it differs from cases of standard consent, futility, or conscientious refusal. Providers sometimes call this problem “Dr. Google.” I call it premature (...) consent. Providers may wonder whether these patient decisions command the same deference and respect as other patient decisions. The answer is “no,” for these patients are neither fully competent nor properly informed. They typically appear to be competent, but competence includes the ability to deliberate, and they are not deliberating well when they make up their minds before consulting a qualified provider. They seem informed, especially after talking to their provider, but they are misinformed about what sources of medical advice to trust. Moreover, being informed requires believing the information one has received, and these patients sometimes don’t believe the information their provider gives them. (shrink)

Journal of Economic Methodology, Volume 19, Issue 2, Page 169-172, June 2012.

In a recent examination of the origins of ordinal utility theory in neoclassical economics, Robert D. Cooter and Peter Rappoport argue that the ordinalist revolution of the 1930s, after which most economists abandoned interpersonal utility comparisons as normative and unscientific, constituted neither unambiguous progress in economic science nor the abandonment of normative theorizing, as many economists and historians of economic thought have generally believed. Rather, the widespread acceptance of ordinalism, with its focus on Pareto optimality, simply represented the emergence of (...) a new neoclassical research agenda that, on the one hand, defined economics differently than had the material welfare theorists of the cardinal utility school and, on the other, adopted a positivist methodology in contrast to the less restrictive empiricism of the cardinalists. (shrink)

In the introduction to Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain, Proctor claims that 'there is a strong resonance among all the essays [in the edited volume] as to the geographical embeddedness of ethics, an argument made implicitly or explicitly that geography matters in finding clarifications of, or solutions to, ethical questions'. There is no doubt that geography, broadly enough construed, can function so as to clarify not only ethical questions but political, social and legal ones as well. While (...) not denying that geographical considerations of various kinds have contributed to discussions about vagrancy, the meaning and use of public space, public welfare in relation to urban development, race and class relations and the like, I shall argue that geographical considerations by themselves have little relevance to the question of the morality of the growing legislation of what has come to be known as anti-vagrant or anti-homelessness laws. Discussions on the relationship between facts and values have advanced considerably since Hume's infamous is-ought distinction, and the interplay of facts and values has been increasingly asserted in contexts far removed from that invoked by Hume. While considerations of fact and value cannot be neatly separated in many cases, I discuss two essays in which geographers make little, if any, case for a connection and show little awareness that a case does have to be made—that facts, even when nicely described, do not by themselves speak value. Geography is then contrasted with architecture with regard to the issue of the embeddedness of ethics in these fields. It has recently been argued that in architecture there is no clear separation between ethical issues and architectural or design problems. Ethics, it is claimed, is intrinsic to the practice of architecture, but extrinsic to most other disciplines—including geography. (shrink)

Entwhistle and Watt (2013) make an important contribution to the person-centred view of health care by reframing past thinking on the subject in terms of the capability approach. Past thinking about person-centred care employs a range of normative values that are arguably supportive of the concept of a person. But ironically these values are not clearly grounded in any account of what the person is. Thus, it is not clear what anchors these values and so how they are to be (...) interpreted. (shrink)

For now, the best way to select a child's genes is to select a potential child who has those genes, using genetic testing and either selective abortion, sperm and egg donors, or selecting embryos for implantation. Some people even wish to select against genes that are only mildly undesirable, or to select for superior genes. I call this selection drift– the standard for acceptable children is creeping upwards. The President's Council on Bioethics and others have raised the parental love objection: (...) Just as we should love existing children unconditionally, so we should unconditionally accept whatever child we get in the natural course of things. If we set conditions on which child we get, we are setting conditions on our love for whatever child we get. Although this objection was prompted by selection drift, it also seems to cover selecting against genes for severe impairments. I argue that selection drift is not inconsistent with the ideal of unconditional parental love and, moreover, that the latter actually implies that we should practise selection drift – in other words, we should try to select potential children with the best genetic endowments. My endowment argument for the second claim works from an analogy between arranging an endowment prior to conception to fund a future child's education, and arranging a genetic endowment by selecting a potential child who already has it, where in both cases the child would not have existed without the endowment. I conclude with some programmatic remarks about the nonidentity problem. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of how individuals act as agents when we employ a narrative approach to explaining their personal identities. It applies Korsgaard's idea of a "reflective structure of consciousness" to provide foundations for a richer account of the individual economic agent, and uses this to explain and distinguish the concepts of personal identity, individual identity, and social identity. The paper argues that individuals' personal identities may be in conflict with their socially constructed individual identities. Individuals' social identities (...) are represented as a link between personal identity and individual identity. The overall framework is proposed as an alternative to the atomistic individual conception and a contribution to the socially embedded individual conception. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by Davis’ [14] theory of the individual in economics. Davis’ analysis is applied to health economics, where the individual is conceived as a utility maximiser, although capable of regarding others’ welfare through interdependent utility functions. Nonetheless, this provides a restrictive and flawed account, engendering a narrow and abstract conception of care grounded in Paretian value and Cartesian analytical frames. Instead, a richer account of the socially embedded individual is advocated, which employs collective intentionality analysis. This provides (...) a sound foundation for research into an approach to health policy that promotes health as a basic human right. (shrink)

This paper argues that collective intentionality analysis provides a theoretical framework, complementary to traditional instrumental rationality analysis, that allows us to explain economic behavior as ‘complex.’ Economic behavior may be regarded as complex if it cannot be reduced to a single explanatory framework. Contemporary mainstream economics, in its reliance on instrumental rationality as the exclusive basis for explaining economic behavior, does not offer an account of economic behavior as complex. Coupling collective intentionality analysis with instrumental rationality analysis, however, makes such (...) an account possible, since collective intentionality analysis arguably presupposes a distinct form of rationality, here labeled a deontological or principle-based rationality. (shrink)

(1984). Weather foreasting and the development of meteorological theory at the Paris Observatory, 1853–1878. Annals of Science: Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 359-382.

This paper argues that collective intentionality analysis provides a theoretical framework, complementary to traditional instrumental rationality analysis, that allows us to explain economic behavior as ‘complex.’ Economic behavior may be regarded as complex if it cannot be reduced to a single explanatory framework. Contemporary mainstream economics, in its reliance on instrumental rationality as the exclusive basis for explaining economic behavior, does not offer an account of economic behavior as complex. Coupling collective intentionality analysis with instrumental rationality analysis, however, makes such (...) an account possible, since collective intentionality analysis arguably presupposes a distinct form of rationality, here labeled a deontological or principle-based rationality. (shrink)

George Soros makes an important analytical contribution to understanding the concept of reflexivity in social science by explaining reflexivity in terms of how his cognitive and manipulative causal functions are connected to one another by a pair of feedback loops (Soros, 2013). Fallibility, reflexivity and the human uncertainty principle. Here I put aside the issue of how the natural sciences and social sciences are related, an issue he discusses, and focus on how his thinking applies in economics. I argue that (...) standard economics assumes a ‘classical’ view of the world in which knowledge and action are independent, but that we live in a complex reflexive world in which knowledge and action are interdependent. I argue that Soros's view provides a reflexivity critique of the efficient market hypothesis seen as depending on untenable claims about the nature of random phenomena and the nature of economic agents. Regarding the former, I develop this critique in terms of Cauchy distributions; regarding the latter I develop it in terms of rational expectations and rational addiction reasoning. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 7, Page 814-815, September 2022.

A question that recent research on the global pandemic raises is: how do the assumptions underlying epidemiological models and economic models differ? Epidemiological models we now know have become quite sophisticated (see Avery et al., 2020). Debate among economic methodologists regarding the nature of modeling has generated a considerable literature as well (Reiss, 2012; Hands, 2013). Yet these two literatures are largely non-communicating. Perhaps this is because economics has produced relatively little research on pandemics (though see Boianovsky and Erreygers, 2021). (...) Yet it might still be asked, what might economic models be missing that epidemiological models capture? And might there be some sort of methodological bias in mainstream economics that plays a role in this? One way, then, one might begin to answer these questions is by identifying the main phenomenon in question, namely, in the case of the pandemic, a particular type of process, and ask what the nature of this type of process is. Then we may ask whether there is something about this type of phenomenon that places it out of bounds for current economic methodology. Thus, what sort of phenomenon is a pandemic? (shrink)

We reply to the Ioannidis's paper "Effectiveness of antidepressants; an evidence based myth constructed from a thousand controlled trials." We disagree that antidepressants have no greater efficacy than placebo. We present the efficacy from hundreds of trials in terms of the percentage of patients with a substantial clinical response (a 50% improvement or more symptomatic reduction). This meta-analysis finds that 42-70% of depressed patients improve with drug and 21%-39% improve with placebo. The response benefit of antidepressant treatment is 33%-11% greater (...) than placebo. Ioannidis argues that it would be vanishingly smaller because systematic biasing in these clinical trials would reduce the drug-placebo difference to zero. Ioannidis' argument that antidepressants have no benefit is eroded by his failures of logic because he does not present any evidence that there are a large number of studies where placebo is substantially more effective than drug. (To reduce to zero, one would also have to show that some of the unpublished studies find placebo better than drug and have substantial systematic or methodological bias). We also present the empirical evidence showing that these methodological concerns generally have the opposite effect of what Ioannidis argues, supporting our contention that the measured efficacy of antidepressants likely underestimates true efficacy.Our most important criticism is Ioannidis’ basic underlying argument about antidepressants that if the existing evidence is imperfect and methods can be criticized, then this proves that antidepressant are not efficacious. He presents no credible evidence that antidepressants have zero effect size. Valid arguments can point out difficulties with the data but do not prove that a given drug had no efficacy. Indeed better evidence might prove it was more efficacious that originally found.We find no empirical or ethical reason why psychiatrists should not try to help depressed patients with drugs and/or with psychotherapeutic/behavioral treatments given evidence of efficacy even though our treatment knowledge has limitations. The immense suffering of patients with major depression leads to ethical, moral, professional and legal obligations to treat patients with the best available tools at our disposal, while diligently and actively monitoring for adverse effects and actively revising treatment components as necessary. (shrink)

This paper discusses how Mark Blaug reversed his thinking about the historiography of economics, abandoning 'rational' for 'historical' reconstruction, and using an economics of scientific knowledge argument against Paul Samuelson and others that rational reconstructions of past ideas and theories in the "marketplace of ideas" were Pareto inefficient. Blaug's positive argument for historical reconstruction was built on the concept of "lost content" and his rejection of the end-state view of competition in favor of a process view. He used these ideas (...) to emphasize path dependency in the development of economic thinking, thereby advancing an evolutionary view of economics that has connections to a Lakatosian understanding of economic methodology. The paper argues that Blaug was essentially successful in criticizing the standard rational reconstructionist view of the history of economic thought in economics, and that this is borne out by the nature of the change in recent economics. (shrink)

We sometimes decide what to do by applying moral principles to cases, but this is harder than it looks. Principles are more general than cases, and sometimes it is hard to tell whether and how a principle applies to a given case. Sometimes two conflicting principles seem to apply to the same case. To handle these problems, we use a kind of judgment to ascertain whether and how a principle applies to a given case, or which principle to follow when (...) two principles seem to conflict. But what do we discern when we make such judgments—that is, what makes such judgments correct? The obvious answer is that they are made correct by whatever makes other moral judgments correct. However, that cannot be right, for a principle can be inconsistent with morality yet still apply in a particular way to a given case. If the principle is inconsistent with morality, then morality cannot be what we discern when we judge whether and how that principle applies to a given case. I offer an alternative account of what makes such judgments correct. (shrink)

In this interview, professor Davis discusses the evolution of his career and research interests as a philosopher-economist and gives his perspective on a number of important issues in the field. He argues that historians and methodologists of economics should be engaged in the practice of economics, and that historians should be more open to philosophical analysis of the content of economic ideas. He suggests that the history of recent economics is a particularly fruitful and important area for research exactly because (...) it is an open-ended story that is very relevant to understanding the underlying concerns and concepts of contemporary economics. He discusses his engagement with heterodox economics schools, and their engagement with a rapidly changing mainstream economics. He argues that the theory of the individual is “the central philosophical issue in economics” and discusses his extensive contributions to the issue. (shrink)

Discussions of life extension ethics have focused mainly on whether an extended life would be desirable to have, and on the social consequences of widely available life extension. I want to explore a different range of issues: four ways in which the advent of life extension will change our relationship with death, not only for those who live extended lives, but also for those who cannot or choose not to. Although I believe that, on balance, the reasons in favor of (...) developing life extension outweigh the reasons against doing so, most of these changes probably count as reasons against doing so. First, the advent of life extension will alter the human condition for those who live extended lives, and not merely by postponing death. Second, it will make death worse for those who lack access to life extension, even if those people live just as long as they do now. Third, for those who have access to life extension but prefer to live a normal lifespan because they think that has advantages, the advent of life extension will somewhat reduce some of those advantages, even if they never use life extension. Fourth, refusing life extension turns out to be a form of suicide, and this will force those who have access to life extension but turn it down to choose between an extended life they don't want and a form of suicide they may consider immoral. (shrink)

The papers in this special symposium issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology advance a variety of perspectives on the current state and possible future development of economic methodology and...

Among industrialized nations the United States is relatively unique in relying on a mix of public and private financing and delivery of healthcare: federal and federal-state programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid; employment-based health insurance ; and state-subsidized insurance pools for high-risk individuals. In recent years, however, there have been efforts to apply the principles of private employment-based health insurance to the other forms of healthcare, and there is speculation that rising healthcare costs can only be addressed by further extending (...) capitated payment plans. This suggests that U.S. healthcare may increasingly be organized according to market principles. For some, this represents a historic departure from an emphasis on public responsibility for healthcare and a sacrifice of the value principles embodied in health relationships between patient and provider. But defenders of HMOs and a larger role for markets argue that managed care allows for a more rational allocation of scarce healthcare resources by minimizing inefficient low-benefit–high-cost care. More individuals receive essential care if inessential care is eliminated. HMOs are also said to encourage non-HMOs to provide lower priced healthcare. (shrink)

The essays included in this volume are concerned with assessing Newton's contribution to the thought of others. They explore all aspects of the conceptual background-historical, philosophical, and narrowly methodological-and examine questions that developed in the wake of Newton's science.