Decision Theory and Social Ethics

Ethics, as one of the most respectable disciplines of philosophy, has undergone a drastic and revolutionary change in recent time. There are three main trends of this development. The first trend can be described as a tendency towards a rigorous formal and analytical language. This means simply that ethics has created beside its own formalized set­ theoretical language a variety of new formalized, logical and mathemati­ cal methods and concepts. Thus ethics has become a formalized meta­ or epidiscipline which is going to replace the traditional concepts, principles and ethical methods in the realm of social sciences. It is clear that a formalized form of ethics can be used more easily in social, economic and political theories if there are ethical conflicts to be solved. This first trend can be regarded as a conditio sine qua non for application in, and imposing ethical solutions on, social scientific theories. The second trend may be characterized as an association- or unification-tendency of a formalized and analytical ethics with decision theory. Decision theory as a new interdiscipline of social sciences is actually an assemblage of a variety of subtheories such as value-utility theory, game theory, collective decision theory, etc. Harsanyi has called this complex of subtheories a general theory of human behavior. Analytical or formal ethics is actually using this general theory of human behavior as a vehicle simply because this theory deals from the beginning with conflict solution, i. e.

Contenu

1 / Philosophy and Ethical Principles.- Rule Utilitarianism and Decision Theory.- Marx and the Utility Approach to the Ethical Foundation of Microeconomics.- Endogenous Changes in Tastes: A Philosophical Discussion.- 2 / Social and Collective Choice Theory.- Nice Decision Schemes.- The Distribution of Rights in Society.- Acceptable Social Choice Lotteries.- Social Decision, Strategic Behavior, and Best Outcomes.- Cyclically Mixed Preferences-A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Transitivity of the Social Preference Relation.- Comparative Distributive Ethics: An Extension of Sen's Examination of the Pure Distribution Problem.- Rawls's Theory of Justice: An Impossibility Result.- Arrow's Impossibility Theorem: Some New Aspects.- Two Proofs of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem on the Possibility of a Strategy-Proof Social Choice Function.- 3 / Special Topics in Social Choice.- Ethics, Institutions and Optimality.- Complexity and Social Decision Rules.- Discrete Optimization and Social Decision Methods.- The Equity Principle in Economic Behavior.- The Distributive Justice of Income Inequality.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.