On the Relevance of John Rawls's Theory of Justice to Welfare Economics

Edgren, John

doi:10.1080/00346769500000027

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…(Rawls 1971: 12) At the start of TJ, Rawls goes as far as to claim that 'the theory of justice is a part, perhaps the most significant part, of the theory of rational choice ' (1971: 15). Further, one can find many other borrowings from economic theory (on this issue, see more particularly d 'Aspremont 1984;Edgren 1995). But Rawls aims as well at proceeding from Kant's theory.…”

Section: The 'Second' Rawls and The Merit Goods: Between Exclusion Anmentioning

confidence: 96%

Rawls's justice theory and its relations to the concept of merit goods

Ege¹,

Igersheim²

2010

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the status that the concept of merit goods (as first stated by Musgrave in The Theory of Public Finance) has/should have in Rawls's theory. We first examine Rawls's position regarding this issue in A Theory of Justice. Next, we claim that the attitude of the 'second' Rawls about it is rather ambiguous and vacillates between exclusion and inclusion. We attempt to prove that thanks to the concepts Rawls has developed from 1985 onwards (especially the concept of public reason), he could have resorted to the concept of merit goods to cope better with his new objectives.Philosophical theories of justice, Rawls, public reason, merit goods, public goods,

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Section: The 'Second' Rawls and The Merit Goods: Between Exclusion Anmentioning

confidence: 96%

Rawls's justice theory and its relations to the concept of merit goods

Ege¹,

Igersheim²

2010

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought

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“…Both trends are well documented and deeply studied in the literature (on Rawls's relationships with economists, past or contemporaries, see d 'Aspremont 1984, Edgren 1995, Duhamel 2006, 2012, Gharbi 2013, Gilardone 2015, Hawi 2015, 2016; on Rawls's evolution, see among others Ladrière and van Parijs 1984, Audard 1988, 1993, Höffe 1988, Daniels 1989, Guillarme 1999, Munoz-Dardé 2003, Ege and Igersheim 2008, 2010. But to the best of our knowledge there is no work devoted to a study of the relationships between Rawls and his contemporaries economists beyond their published documents.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Rawls and the Economists: The (Im)possible Dialogue

Igersheim¹

2023

Revue Économique

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Although falling within the scope of political and moral philosophy, it is well known that A Theory of Justice has also had a great impact on economists. As such, Rawls put great emphasis on his desire to combine economics and philosophy, and particularly to deal with rational choice theory, notably and famously claiming that "the theory of justice is a part, perhaps the most significant part, of the theory of rational choice" (1971, 15). After the publication of A Theory of Justice, aspects of it came in for criticismoften very vehementby economists such as Arrow (1973), Musgrave (1974), Harsanyi (1975 and later by Sen (1980). Rawls's immediate answers (1974a,b in particular) showed that he first wanted to maintain a dialogue with the economists, but the later evolutions of his works (1993, 2001) clearly demonstrated that he had removed himself from the economic realm, returning to his initial philosophical territory in order to overcome the internal inconsistencies of A Theory of Justice. In this paper, by focusing extensively on the letter exchanges between Rawls and the economists before and after the publication of A Theory of Justice, I attempt to shed light on other (complementary) elements which can explain Rawls's retreat from the realm of economics, and his progressive disenchantment regarding the possibility of a dialogue on equal footing between economists and philosophers.

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