Economics still needs philosophy

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ On these misrepresentations, see Rothschild (2001). Other valuable recent contributions for understanding Smith’s philosophical views and their relationship to his economic views include Griswold (1999), Fleischacker (1999, 2004), and Muller (1995). For an overview, see Darwall (1999).

² An honorable exception, from the start, was the leading bioethicist Brock (1993).

³ Thus, in doing research on liberal education, I found that the Catholic universities all strongly encourage philosophy and typically require it of all undergraduates since Roman Catholicism is a very rationalist religion; Baptist universities and Brigham Young University, a Mormon university, are at the other extreme, and students who major in philosophy often face peer pressure not to do so (see Nussbaum 1997a, ch. 8).

⁴ Of course the same is true of the normative term “welfare.”

⁵ Rather than provide a comprehensive bibliography here, which would make this footnote as long as an article, I refer readers, instead, to the fine The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Freeman 2002), which contains a comprehensive bibliography on all these issues, and valuable articles on many topics, including most of those mentioned here. (I contributed the article on Rawls and feminism.)

⁶ This is a point associated with my work: see Nussbaum (2006).

⁷ See Nussbaum (2010a); a revised and updated edition of this paper was published in the International Review of Economics (Nussbaum 2012).

⁸ Cass R. Sunstein, a philosophically trained legal scholar, was the head of OIRA when this requirement was introduced.

⁹ For the relationship between the two problems, see Nussbaum (2015b).

¹⁰ See Maritain (1951), Chapters IV and V, especially IV.1, entitled “Men Mutually Opposed in Their Theoretical Conceptions Can Come to a Merely Practical Agreement Regarding a List of Human Rights.” Maritain was one of the primary framers of the Universal Declaration.

¹¹ I should emphasize that this defense of political liberalism is my own, and not that of Sen, who probably does not agree with this, and may well favor a more comprehensive doctrine of human agency and choice, like that of Joseph Raz.

¹² Mill (1874) makes this replacement idea explicit; it is implicit in Bentham, who had no patience with religion. Sidgwick is a far more complicated story since he was unconventional enough to be forced out of his Cambridge fellowship, but conventional enough to worry about religious norms and take them very seriously (see Schultz 2004). Still, Sidgwick continued to frame Utilitarianism as a fully comprehensive doctrine.

¹³ For this reason, I have insisted on including it in an edited volume (Comim and Nussbaum 2014).

¹⁴ See in particular Seyla Benhabib’s excellent “Cultural Complexity, Moral Interdependence, and the Global Dialogical Community” (Benhabib 1995). I give my own version of this argument in Nussbaum (2000, ch. 1).

¹⁵ For Harsanyi’s view, see Harsanyi (1983).

¹⁶ A dissertation by Long (2012) has made a good beginning of answering this question in the affirmative.

¹⁷ See Jon Elster’s “Sour Grapes” (Elster 1983) and the book of the same title (Elster 1985). Sen has frequently discussed this phenomenon; two examples are Sen (1984, 1995).

¹⁸ Most recently, in Nussbaum (2013), and next in Nussbaum (2016).