Abstract
It is an established American tradition to belittle the study of morals and ethics—“Dry,” Jefferson said1; “subservient to experience,” argued Oliver Wendell Holmes.2 As for morals in practice, Robert Louis Stevenson said they should be “concealed like a vice.”3 And Henry Adams, in the same vein, observed that morals are a “private and costly luxury.”4 As one now reads the writings of early Puritans, the battle of sin and indulgence appears more like a lively duel than a matter of right and wrong. Cotton Mather writes, “The diseases of my soul are not cured until I arrive to the most unspotted Chastitie and Puritie.” However, he quickly exonerates himself by bracketing his sexual appetite for his third wife: “I do not apprehend that Heaven requires me uterlie to lay aside my fondness for my lovelie Consort.”5
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Notes
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Robert Skipwith (August 3, 1771), p. 77 in Julian P. Boyd et al., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–74.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law. Boston: Little, Brown, 1881, p. 110.
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Christmas Sermon. London: Chatto & Windus, 1908, p. 19.
The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918, p. 335.
Quoted in Sanford Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978, p. 75.
The Writings of William James. Ed. John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 623.
See Morton White, Social Thought in America. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952, pp. 145–146.
John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” pp. 3–70 in J. Dewey, A. W Moore, H. C. Brown, G. H. Mead, B. H. Bode, H. W. Stuart, J. H. Tufts, and H. M. Kallen, Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude. New York: Holt, 1917, pp. 63–64.
Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
Ibid., pp. 113–114.
Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method. Trans. Sarah A. Soloway and John H. Mueller. Ed. George E. G. Catlin. New York: Macmillan, 1938, pp. 65–73.
P._W. Musgrave, Socializing Contexts. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987.
John Anouilh, Antigone. Adapted by Lewis Galantiere. New York: Samuel French, 1947.
The term comes from a classic essay by Dennis Wrong. See his “The Over-socialized View of Man,” American Sociological Review 26 (1961): 183–193.
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. lvi.
William A. Gamson, Bruce Fireman, and Steven Rytina, Encounters with Unjust Authority. Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1982, p. 14.
Lewis A. Coser, Greedy Institutions. New York: Free Press, 1956.
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In Kurt Wolff (ed. and trans.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950, pp. 402–408.
Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 75.
Ibid., p. 511.
Ibid., p. 101.
Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Guillermina Jasso, “A New Theory of Distributive Justice,” American Sociological Review 45 (February 1980): 3–30.
Rawls, op. cit., p. 73.
Douglas Rae, Equalities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, p. 73.
Wolfe, op. cit., pp. 239–241.
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Ibid., p. 33.
The question of whether people cooperate or tend to maximize their own outcomes has led to a sizable industry. Amaitai Etzioni estimates that there are over 1,000 studies involving the experiment. See The Moral Dimension. New York: Free Press, 1988, p. 60.
This is Gellner’s twist on the game; see Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book. London: Collins Harvill, 1988, pp. 251–252.
Ibid.
Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.
Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1987.
Ibid., p. 85.
Schelling, op. cit.
Ibid.
Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 52–53.
Kenneth Arrow, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care,” American Economic Review 53 (1963): 941–973.
Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973; James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Berlin, op. cit., p. 170.
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(1993). The Micrometrics of Morals and the Macrotnetrics of Ethics. In: Social Contracts and Economic Markets. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-28187-2_10
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