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View submission: Suggestions for undergrad readings regarding economics and ethics?
You certainly need some Amartya Sen in that class. There's an embarrassment of riches to choose from, but I'd include the articles 'The Impossibility of the Pareto Liberal' and 'Rational Fools' for sure. Maybe some readings from the book *Development as Freedom*, to show the role Sen thinks economics can play for us in arranging just and beneficial outcomes? For a critique of utilitarianism, his and Bernard Williams's introduction to *Utilitarianism and Beyond* should do very nicely.
A very good article to give to undergraduates is Marc Sagoff, 'At the Shrine of Our Lady Fatima: or why political questions are not all economic', which is what it says on the tin. Jon Elster's 'The Market and the Forum' would be a more economics-friendly take on the same question. Gauthier's *Morals by Agreement* probably is the best attempt to have economics-driven ethics (given he defines the domain of ethics as responding to market failures), but that book is so large, weird and unified that taking out a reading may be hard. Maybe the first chapter? If you want to give them a solid-gold example of someone biting a bullet, give them Gauthier's argument that the native Americans were benefited by the replacement of their traditional ways of life by Western lifestyles, though of course not by the manner of the introduction (in Chapter 9).
I'd introduce the students to Kenneth Arrow's demonstration that the market fails to give good guidance for distributing resources in healthcare (because of structural features that make perfect information impossible to even approximate), but this may only be because I'm sick of people acting as if using the market to regulate healthcare is sound economic thinking. I would be a useful demonstration of the limits of what markets can do for us, though, and a very interesting example of a market failure, different from the ones which have to do with the delivery of necessary but unprofitable services.
On Marx, I recommend readings from Robert Paul Wolff's *Understanding Marx*, in particular Wolff's version of the Marxist argument that workers are exploited by capitalist labour (at the end of the book), also included in his article 'A Critique and Reinterpretation of Marx's Theory of Value'.
Comment by drinka40tonight at 05/12/2013 at 02:45 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is great stuff; thanks.