Why Economists Should Take Ethics Seriously

This paper arises out of a project we have been working on for the past two years concerning the relationships between economics and moral philosophy. The impetus for the project was an invitation from John Roemer to write a survey essay on the subject for the Journal of Economic Literature. That essay is now complete and will be published shortly (Hausman and McPherson, 1993), but we have hardly exhausted the subject. In this paper, we will mention some of the conclusions we have reached, though there is no good way to condense a survey of contemporary moral philosophy into a brief essay.