Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

So, as we consider the realm of politics, we should not engage in the sport of building a coalition of like-minded individuals, defeating competing coalitions, and then implementing as law that which we already know to be best. That’s a popular approach, and it makes us feel good about ourselves and our own supposed superiority, but it is unjustified. We need to be more modest when it comes to what we can possibly know.

if individuals are poorly informed, confused, or downright inconsistent—as nearly all of us are, at times—the notion of “what we want” isn’t always so clear. So while I am an economist, and I will use a lot of economic arguments, I won’t always side with the normative approach of my discipline, which puts too much emphasis on satisfying preferences at the expense of other ethical values. We need to make more room for justice and beauty.

If a policy harms human well-being, on net, it has a high hurdle to overcome. If “doing the right thing” does not create a better world in terms of well-being on a repeated basis, we should begin to wonder whether our conception of “the right thing” makes sense. That said, human well-being is not always an absolute priority—thus the half-in-jest reference to my two-thirds weighting for utility. We sometimes ought to do that which is truly just, even if it is painful for many people. I should not forcibly excise one of your kidneys simply because you can do without it and someone else needs one. We should not end civilization to do what is just, but justice does sometimes trump utility. And justice cannot be reduced to what makes us happy or to what satisfies our preferences.