Abstract
Contingency matters. Most determinants of our existence are neither the result of our deliberate choices nor the result of necessary laws of nature but are contingent. The facts of birth like the historical age, the generation, the place, the religion, and the family are contingent as well as are the facts of our fate, talent, health, life expectancy. Most traits of the person and of the economic and social institutions the person lives in are contingent in the sense that they could also easily have turned out to be different. Contingency is a basic attribute of human existence and society. It is, so the thesis of this paper, also the basic argument for the market. The market is seen here as the institution processing contingency and supporting societies to be able to transform contingency into realized chances and to expand the satisfaction possibility frontier of the individuals as much as possible. In terms of Leibnizian philosophy, the market realizes the maximum of compossibility of existence of humans, the maximum of human existence that can exist together at one point in space and time.
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References
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Thomas Aquinas distinguished in his interpretation of Aristotle’s De interpretatione three kinds of contingent events: first rare events (ut in paucioribus) which are grounded in accident and chance (a casu vel fortuna),secondly what relates in the same way to both options (ad utrumlibet) and is caused therefore by free choice (ex electione),and thirdly what happens in most cases (ut in pluribus) and is caused by nature (ex natura). Cf. ThomasAquinas: In libros Peri Hermeneias Expositio,1, 13, editio Leonina, vol. I, Roma, Paris 1889, p. 67f. (1. 164–173)
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Koslowski, P. (2002). Contingencies, the Limits of Systems, and the Morality of the Market. In: Brennan, G., Kliemt, H., Tollison, R.D. (eds) Method and Morals in Constitutional Economics. Studies in Economic Ethics and Philosophy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04810-8_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04810-8_30
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