Is it just to tax the rich to help the poor? John Rawls says we should answer this question by asking what principles you would choose to govern the distribution of income and wealth if you did not know who you were, whether you grew up in privilege or in poverty. Continue reading Justice: what’s the right thing to do?
by Sanjay Perera Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple … Continue reading Making moral philosophy relevant again: the rent across the ‘veil of ignorance’
by Sanjay Perera
We return to the idea of general equilibrium and the transcendent nature of it espoused by economists and the problems ensuing from this. Another normative aspect to this for economists, in terms of what good a state of equilibrium can produce is highlighted by the so-called Pareto criterion. Continue reading A critique of Capital (3): Toward a moral economy
by Sanjay Perera
From the perspective of the Kantian critique the problem with the synthetic idea of general equilibrium is that it fast becomes a transcendent one. Continue reading A critique of Capital (2): The metaphysics of economics
by Sanjay Perera
In the introductory lines of a textbook on economics are these words: “Are Marxists correct in arguing that only vast expenditure on arms saves the capitalist countries from a return of mass unemployment? Or have we now learned…how to avoid forever such devastating situations? Why, then, in the late 1970s, did unemployment in Britain, the United States and several other countries reach the highest levels ever attained since the Great Depression of the 1930s?” Continue reading A critique of Capital (1): The problem with economics
by Daniel Little My subject here is the role of ethical principles in the conduct of economic development planning and strategy. Bluntly, what does justice in development involve, and why should policy makers care? The field of “development ethics” has been around for at least fifty years, since the publications of Gunnar Myrdal (Myrdal, 1968). But it has received more focus and attention in the past thirty years, led by the brilliant work of Amartya Sen. Sen has many qualifications for theorizing about the ethics of development. He is a Nobel prize winning economist, he is an Asian by birth, … Continue reading Global economic justice
by Jeff Noonan The failure of the Durban Conference on Climate Change, (December, 2011) to agree to anything more substantial than that all nations would work together to develop binding targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 is a metonym for the life-crisis besetting globalised capitalism.[1] Because global capitalism subordinates what John McMurtry calls “life-value” to the expansion and accumulation of money-value, it progressively undermines the conditions of planetary life-support, human life-requirement satisfaction, and meaningful human life-capacity development and enjoyment.[2] Resources, relationships, practices, norms, institutions, and forms of life-activity have life-value when they: a) satisfy objective requirements of human … Continue reading The capitalist life crisis
Philosophers for Change 