In a school choice problem, each school has a priority ordering over the set of students. These orderings depend on criteria such as whether a student lives within walking distance or has a sibling at the school. A priority ordering provides a ranking of students but nothing more. I argue that this information is sufficient when priority is based on merit but not when priority is based on criteria such as walking distance. I propose an extended formulation of the problem wherein a ‘priority matrix’, indicating which criteria are satisfied by each student-school pair, replaces the usual priority orderings.

In response to Roemer's reformulation of the Marxian concept of exploitation in terms of comparative wealth distributions (1982, 1996), Vrousalis (2013) treats economic exploitation as an explicitly relational phenomenon in which one party takes advantage of the other's economic vulnerability in order to extract a net benefit. This paper offers a critical assessment of Vrousalis's account, prompting a revised formulation that is analysed in the context of a matching and bargaining model. This analysis yields precise representations of Vrousalis's conditions of economic vulnerability and economic exploitation and facilitates comparison to the alternative conceptions of Marx and Roemer.

According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences, that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.

In his Comment ‘Adam Smith on the Morality of the Pursuit of Fortune’, Richard Arlen Kleer accepts much of the argument in my article ‘Signifying Voices’ (Brown, 1991) but insists that I have ‘gone too far’ (Kleer, 1993). Kleer agrees that there is a moral hierarchy in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) where benevolence and self-command are ranked higher than justice and prudence, but he is uneasy with the conclusion that economic activity and the pursuit of gain are ‘amoral’ activities and insists that they do have a significant moral standing. In addition, although Kleer accepts a good deal of the stylistic analysis, again he is uneasy with the results that are derived from it. This reply will take each of these aspects in turn.

In his critique of rational choice theory, Amartya Sen claims that committed agents do not (or not exclusively) pursue their own goals. This claim appears to be nonsensical since even strongly heteronomous or altruistic agents cannot pursue other people's goals without making them their own. It seems that self-goal choice is constitutive of any kind of agency.

In this paper, Sen's radical claim is defended. It is argued that the objection raised against Sen's claim holds only with respect to individual goals. Not all goals, however, are individual goals; there are shared goals, too. Shared goals are irreducible to individual goals, as the argument from we-derivativeness and the argument from normativity show. It is further claimed that an adequate account of committed action defies both internalism and externalism about practical reason.

Neuroeconomics focuses on brain imaging studies mapping neural responses to choice behaviour. Economic theory is concerned with choice behaviour but it is silent on neural activities. We present a game theoretic model in which players are endowed with an additional structure – a simple “nervous system” – and interact repeatedly in changing games. The nervous system constrains information processing functions and behavioural functions. By reinterpreting results from evolutionary game theory (Germano 2007), we suggest that nervous systems can develop to “function well” in exogenously changing strategic environments. We present an example indicating that an analogous conclusion fails if players can influence endogenously their environment.

In the ‘Introduction’ to Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman's stated intentions are to: (i) establish the role of competitive capitalism as a system of economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom; (ii) indicate the proper role of government in a free society; and (iii) return the term ‘liberal’ ‘… to its original sense – as the doctrines pertaining to a free man’ (1962, p. 6). In fact, Friedman accomplishes none of these things. This essay has three distinct, though related, objectives: first, to compare Friedman's position with the liberal alternative; second, to show why Friedman's position is more properly regarded as libertarian than liberal; and third, to assess the quality of Friedman's argument in its own right. My purpose is to demonstrate that Friedman overlooks the important liberal insight that the unrestricted accumulation of private propety may limit rather than promote individual freedom. This omission is crucial. Not only does it divorce Friedman's conception from liberalism, it also vitiates his case for economic freedom as a necessary condition for political freedom.

This symposium publishes for the first time three key contributions to the debate on the nature and importance of the distinction between egalitarianism (the view that it is in itself bad, when and because it is unfair, for some to be worse off than others) and prioritarianism (the view that each person's welfare has diminishing marginal moral value and that the moral value of a person's welfare depends only on that person's level of welfare, and not on how anyone else fares). These papers were commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000. They were intended for publication in a WHO volume which has not yet materialized, and this has hindered access to these important papers. Permission was therefore secured from the WHO to publish them here.