The concept of patience describes a person's ability to make prolonged efforts towards future goals, and his or her ability to consider long-term future consequences. Clearly, patience is a capacity that comes by degrees. On the following pages, a person will be said to be patient to the extent that his actions are motivated by future consequences. Hence, a person is not patient if he has the ability to see long-term consequences, while being unable to take these consequences into consideration when he decides how to act.

What should maximin egalitarians think about seniority privileges? We contrast a good-specific and an all-things-considered perspective. As to the former, inertia and erasing effects of a seniority-based allocation of benefits from employment are identified, allowing us to spot the categories of workers and job-seekers made involuntarily worse off by such a practice. What matters however is to find out whether abolishing seniority privileges will bring about a society in which the all-things-considered worst off people are better off than in the seniority rule's presence. An assessment of the latter's cost-reduction potential is thus needed, enabling us to bridge a practice taking place within a firm with its impact on who the least well off members of society are likely to be. Three accounts of the profitability of seniority privileges are discussed: the “(firm specific) human capital”, the “deferred compensation” and the “knowledge transfer” ones. The respective relevance of “good-specific” and “all-things-considered” analysis is discussed. It turns out that under certain circumstances, a maximin egalitarian case for seniority privileges could be made.

Senior: Do you know that they are planning layoffs? Of course, it is only fair that they lay-off the newcomers first! After all, I have been loyal to the company for many years.

Junior: Did I choose to be a newcomer?

Recently the demand for rectification of past injustices has become an increasingly important issue. Each of the last three decades has witnessed democratization processes in the Mediterranean basin, Latin America, in Central and Eastern Europe and in Africa where debates have arisen over rectification of past wrongs which naturally include the unjust expropriation of property. Most recently, moreover, the idea of land restitution to indigenous people, particularly in Australia, Canada and Zimbabwe, has become a prominent, if not always equanimous, part of those countries' domestic political agendas. The difficulties associated with satisfying such demands have been discussed with particular regard to the framing of new post-Communist constitutions in eastern and central Europe by, among others, Jon Elster and Claus Offe. Yet, not only in the field of public policy has the issue of rectification become important. Perhaps because of these developments, there has been a resurgence of interest in rectification in political philosophy as is shown by a forthcoming collection of essays on the subject edited by Elster.

The past fifteen years or so have witnessed considerable progress in our understanding of how the human brain works. One of the objectives of the fast-growing field of neuroscience is to deepen our knowledge of how the brain perceives and interacts with the external world. Advances in this direction have been made possible by progress in brain imaging techniques and by clinical data obtained from patients with localized brain lesions. A relatively new field within neuroscience is neuroeconomics, which focuses on individual decision making and aims to systematically classify and map the brain activity that correlates with decision-making that pertains to economic choices. Neuroeconomic studies rely heavily on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures the haemodynamic response (that is, changes in the blood flow) related to neural activity in the brain.

Roughly, according to conditional egalitarianism, equality is non-instrumentally valuable, but only if it benefits at least one individual. Some political theorists have argued that conditional egalitarianism has the important virtue that it allows egalitarians to avoid the so-called ‘levelling down’ objection. However, in the present article I argue that conditional egalitarianism does not offer the egalitarian a plausible escape route from this objection. First, I explain the levelling down objection and suggest some particular concerns from which it derives its force. Then I provide a more precise definition of conditional egalitarianism. Finally, I give two arguments against this principle. According to the first, it violates the transitivity of the betterness relation (or more specifically, ‘betterness with respect to equality’). According to the second, there is no plausible explanation of why equality must benefit at least one individual in order to be non-instrumentally valuable.

Instrumental rationality requires that an agent selects those actions that give her the best outcomes. This is the principle of consequentialism. It may be that it is not the only requirement of this form of rationality. Considerations other than the outcomes may enter the picture as well. However, the outcome(s) of an action always play a role in determining its rationality. Seen in this light consequentialism is a minimum requirement of instrumental rationality. Therefore, any theory that tries to spell out the implications of instrumental rationality, in particular expected utility theory, should subscribe to the principle of consequentialism. Or so it seems.

How may we best understand the motivational structure that stands behind individuals' acts of voting? In “The Impartial Spectator Goes to Washington” we suggested that expressive concerns swamp narrowly consequential motivations, in contradistinction to normal market transactions in which the priority is reversed. A striking consequence of this fact is that individuals will be led to vote for outcomes that they would reject were they in a position to act decisively. In this regard we found the moral psychology Adam Smith develops in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) (and, to a lesser extent, in The Wealth of Nations) remarkably fecund in suggesting alternatives to what we call the standard theory of electoral behavior.

In this article I argue that the non-reciprocity problem does not apply to intergenerational justice. Future generations impact, here and now, on the well-being of people now living. I firstly illustrate the economic-synchronic model of direct intergenerational reciprocity (DIR): future generations allow people now living to maintain the economic system future-oriented and capital-preserving. The rational choice for people now living is to guarantee transgenerational sufficiency to future generations. I then analyse the axiological-synchronic model of DIR: future generations give meaning and value to many of the activities that people now living carry out, and this is a compelling reason for the latter to worry about the former. I argue that only the economic-synchronic model of DIR can consistently explain why we need future generations. I conclude by discussing the limits of indirect intergenerational reciprocity.

An article by Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden published in this journal argues that market relations contain elements of what they call ‘fraternity’. This Response demonstrates that my own views on interpersonal relations and markets – which originated in the feminist analysis of caring labour – are far closer to Bruni and Sugden's than they acknowledge in their article, and goes on to discuss additional important dimensions of sociality that they neglect.

Hausman and McPherson defend welfare economics by claiming that even if welfare does not consist in preference satisfaction, preferences still provide good, if fallible, evidence of welfare. I argue that this strategy does not yet fully solve the problems for welfare economics stemming from the preference satisfaction theory of welfare. More work is needed to show that our self-interested preferences are sufficiently reliable, or in some other sense our best, evidence of well-being. Thus, my aim is to identify the challenges that remain and clarify what additional work is needed before Hausman and McPherson's defence of welfare economics succeeds.

Bayesian decision theory operates under the fiction that in any decision-making situation the agent is simply given the options from which he is to choose. It thereby sets aside some characteristics of the decision-making situation that are pre-analytically of vital concern to the verdict on the agent's eventual decision. In this paper it is shown that and how these characteristics can be accommodated within a still recognizably Bayesian account of rational agency.

How do economists persuade their readers that one policy is superior to another? A glance at the literature on welfare economics quickly provides the answer to this question: Economists enter policy debates armed with mathematical models, evaluating options on the basis of their consequences. Economists typically classify a policy change as a welfare (or “potential Pareto”) improvement with respect to the status quo if the gain realized by the winners exceeds the harm sustained by the losers. The best policy becomes the one that generates the highest net benefit.

Martin Hollis, in the introduction to the collection of Rationality and Relativism he edited recently with Steven Lukes, describes himself as the most arch of arch rationalists, “by which we mean, merely, that [we] reject the forthright relativization of truth and reason.” You might suppose that his self-description would place him unambiguously in the army of traditionalists arrayed against what Richard Rorty fondly calls the New Fuzzies (like himself and me). You might suppose, then, that Hollis would indulge in furious letter writing to, say, Harper's, telling us that “we need to stand shoulder to shoulder against the growing army of enemies of rationality. By that I mean the followers of the fashionable cult of absolute relativism, emerging from philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, and deconstructionism.” You might suppose that he would go on in this way equivocating between “rationality” and “rationalism,” identifying the people he dislikes with the enemies of civilization: fascists, Stalinists, bikers, bomb throwing nihilists — Richard Rorty and Wayne Booth and Stephen Toulmin riding into town on their Harley- (or Donald-) Davidsons, spurning warrants for belief and good reasons, reading pornographic comic books (the new literary canon), and snarling at the townsfolk huddled behind the local syllogism.

What is the value of a life? How should we regard death? This paper uses the methods of economics to defend some of the views of Epicurus against the utilitarian approach that welfare economics takes for granted.

How should consumers exercise their basic economic powers? Recently, several authors have argued that consumption to bring about social change must be democratic. Others maintain that we may consume in ways that we believe promote positive change. This paper rejects both accounts and provides a new alternative. It argues that, under just institutions, people may consume as they like as long as they respect the institutions’ rules. Absent just institutions, significant moral constraints on consumption exist. Still, it is permissible, if not obligatory, for people to pursue non-democratic, genuinely positive, change within whatever moral constraints exist.

Rubin and Pearl offered approaches to causal effect estimation and Lewis and Pearl offered theories of counterfactual conditionals. Arguments offered by Pearl and his collaborators support a weak form of equivalence such that notation from the rival theory can be re-purposed to express Pearl’s theory in a way that is equivalent to Pearl’s theory expressed in its native notation. Nonetheless, the many fundamental differences between the theories rule out any stronger form of equivalence. A renewed emphasis on comparative research can help to guide applications, further develop each theory, and better understand their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Numerous instruments have been developed to elicit numerical values that represent the strength of preference for different health states. However, relatively few studies have attempted to analyse the reasoning processes that people employ when they are asked to answer questions based on these elicitation methods. The lottery equivalents method is a preference elicitation instrument that has recently received some attention in the literature. This study attempts a qualitative analysis of the use of this instrument on a group of 25 relatively highly educated respondents. For each of three health states considered in the study, a substantial number of respondents refused to trade the chance of survival for a possible improvement in the health state. Therefore, many respondents violated an assumption that is necessary for the lottery equivalents instrument to generate cardinal health state values. These findings place a question mark against the usefulness of the lottery equivalents method, and add weight to the suspicion that ‘preferences’ are constructed according to how questions are framed.

Theoretical works in economics usually have a core consisting of proofs that a “model-economy” has certain properties. The economist constructs a model that can be looked on as a description of an economy, and then proves that certain relations hold in this economy and/or that certain relations in this economy depend on certain specific characteristics. The model-economy is usually described as simplified or idealized.

In his recent book, Economics – Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns, Alexander Rosenberg has offered a forceful critique of the scientific pretensions of economics. I am encouraged to note that in his JEL review, Wade Hands (1993) singles out Rosenberg's ‘important discussion of intentionality’ as one of the most significant aspects of the book. Encouraged, because this was exactly my impression, and Hands's judgment confirmed my intention to respond to Rosenberg's argument. I hope, however, to be able to disappoint Hands's expectation that this aspect of Rosenberg's work ‘will be least challenged by economists’!