This book shows through argument and numerous policy-related examples how understanding moral philosophy can improve economic analysis, how moral philosophy can benefit from economists' analytical tools, and how economic analysis and moral philosophy together can inform public policy. Part I explores the idea of rationality and its connections to ethics, arguing that when they defend their formal model of rationality, most economists implicitly espouse contestable moral principles. Part II addresses the nature and measurement of welfare, utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis. Part III discusses freedom, rights, equality, and justice - moral notions that are relevant to evaluating policies, but which have played little if any role in conventional welfare economics. Finally, Part IV explores work in social choice theory and game theory that is relevant to moral decision making. Each chapter includes recommended reading and discussion questions.

The essays in this volume take off from themes in the work of eminent philosopher and political scientist Joshua Cohen. Cohen is a deeply influential thinker who has written on deliberative democracy, freedom of expression, Rawlsian theory, global justice, and human rights. The essays gathered here both engage with Cohen's work and expand upon it, embodying his commitment to the idea that analytical work by philosophers and social scientists matters to our shared public life and to democracy itself. The contributors offer novel perspectives on pressing issues of public policy from accountability for sexual violence to exploitation in international trade. The volume is organized around three central ideas. The first concerns democracy, specifically how we can improve collective decision-making both by elucidating our normative principles and enacting institutional changes. The second idea centers on how we confront injustice, investigating the role of emotions, social norms, and culture in democratic politics and public discussion. The final section explores how we develop political principles and values in an interdependent world, one in which theories of justice and forms of cooperation are increasingly extending beyond the state. The principle uniting this collection is that ideas matter-they can guide us in understanding how to confront difficult global problems such as the fragility of democratic institutions, the place of sovereignty in a globalizing world, and the persistence of racial injustice.

Markets are important forms of social and economic organization. They allow vast numbers of people, most of whom never meet, to cooperate together in a system of voluntary exchange. Through markets, people are able to signal to others their own desires, disseminate information, and reward innovation. Markets enable people to adjust their activities without the need for a central authority, and are recognized as the most efficient way we have to organize production and distribution in a complex economy. WIth the death of communism and the rise of globalization, markets and the theories that support them are enjoying a great resurgence. Markets are spreading across the globe, and extending into new domains. Most people view markets as heroic saviors that will remedy the deadening effects of bureaucracy and state control. Are they in fact a positive force?
The noted philosopher Debra Satz takes a skeptical view of markets, pointing out that free markets are not always a force for good. The idea of free exchange of child labor, human organs, reproductive services, weapons, life saving medicines, and addictive drugs, strike many as toxic to human values. She asks: What considerations ought to guide the debates about such markets? What is it about the nature of particular exchanges that concerns us to the point that some types of markets are problematic? How should our social policies respond to these more noxious markets? Categories previously used by philosophers and economists are of limited help, because they assumed markets to be homogenous and of limited scope; Satz develops a broader and more nuanced view of markets whereby they not only allocate resources and incomes, but shapeour culture, foster or thwart human development, and create and support structures of power. Satz's original and long-anticipated expression of her views on this important topic will be of interest to philosophers, political scientists, economists, and scholars in law and public policy.

The late Susan Moller Okin was a leading political theorist whose scholarship integrated political philosophy and issues of gender, the family, and culture. Okin argued that liberalism, properly understood as a theory opposed to social hierarchies and supportive of individual freedom and equality, provided the tools for criticizing the substantial and systematic inequalities between men and women. Her thought was deeply informed by a feminist view that theories of justice must apply equally to women as men, and she was deeply engaged in showing how many past and present political theories failed to do this. She sought to rehabilitate political theories--particularly that of liberal egalitarianism, in such a way as to accommodate the equality of the sexes, and with an eye toward improving the condition of women and families in a world of massive gender inequalities. In her lifetime Okin was widely respected as a scholar whose engagement went well beyond the world of theory, and her premature death in 2004 was considered by many a major blow to progressive political thought and women's interests around the world.
This volume stems from a conference on Okin, and contains articles by some of the top feminist and political philosophers working today. They are organized around a set of themes central to Okin's work, namely liberal theory, gender and the family, feminist and cultural differences, and global justice. Included are major figures such as Joshua Cohen, David Miller, Cass Sunstein, Alison Jaggar, and Iris Marion Young, among others. Their aim is not to celebrate Okin's work, but to constructively engage with it and further its goals.

In this pathbreaking study of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mill, Susan Moller Okin turns to the tradition of political philosophy that pervades Western culture and its institutions to understand why the gap between formal and real gender equality persists. Our philosophical heritage, Okin argues, largely rests on the assumption of the natural inequality of the sexes. Women cannot be included as equals within political theory unless its deep-rooted assumptions about the traditional family, its sex roles, and its relation to the wider world of political society are challenged. So long as this attitude pervades our institutions and behavior, the formal equality women have won has no chance of becoming substantive.

This book shows through argument and numerous policy-related examples how understanding moral philosophy can improve economic analysis, how moral philosophy can benefit from economists' analytical tools, and how economic analysis and moral philosophy together can inform public policy. Part I explores the idea of rationality and its connections to ethics, arguing that when they defend their formal model of rationality, most economists implicitly espouse contestable moral principles. Part II addresses the nature and measurement of welfare, utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis. Part III discusses freedom, rights, equality, and justice - moral notions that are relevant to evaluating policies, but which have played little if any role in conventional welfare economics. Finally, Part IV explores work in social choice theory and game theory that is relevant to moral decision making. Each chapter includes recommended reading and discussion questions.

For many, markets are the most efficient way in general to organize production and distribution in a complex economy. But what about those markets we might label noxious-markets in addictive drugs, say, or in sex? In Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, philosopher Debra Satz takes a penetrating look at those commodity exchanges that strike most of us as problematic. What considerations, she asks, ought to guide the debates about such markets? Satz contends that categories previously used by philosophers and economists are of limited use in addressing such markets because they are assumed to be homogenous. Accordingly, she offers a broader and more nuanced view of markets-one that goes beyond the usual discussions of efficiency and distributional equality-to show how markets shape our culture, foster or thwart human development, and create and support structures of power. Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow calls this book "a work that will have to be studied and taken account of by all those concerned by the role of the market as compared with other social mechanisms."