PLEASE NOTE this is a sample reading list for the 2015-16 academic year – precise seminar content
may change from year to year.
Detailed Reading List
Week 2: Individual Choice and Rationality I
Peter Hammond (Econ)
Core Reading:
Hammond, Peter. “Rationality in Economics”. Rivista Internazionale Di Scienze Sociali
Anno CV, 247–288; available at: http://www.stanford.edu/~hammond/ratEcon.pdf.
Additional Reading:
Broome, John. 2007. ‘Can there be a preference-based utilitarianism?’In Marc Fleurbaey, Maurice
Salles and John Weymark (eds.) Justice, Political Liberalism and Utilitarianism. Cambridge
University Press. See http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0060/
Broome, John. Forthcoming. ‘Why economics needs ethical theory’, in Welfare, Development,
Philosophy and Social Science: Essays for Amartya Sen's 75th Birthday. Volume 3, edited by
Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur, Oxford University Press. See http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0060/.
Broome, John. 1999. Ethics Out of Economics, Cambridge University Press.
Canning David, 2007, Valuing Lives Equally and Welfare
Economics http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/pgda/Working%20Papers/2007/PGDA_WP_27_2007.pdf(
Sections 1, 2 and 7)
Fallon, R.H. 2003. “Should we all be welfare economists?” Michigan Law Review 101(4): 9791025. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1290513
Hammond, Peter. Unpublished. "Can Utility be an Ethically Valuable Concept?" (available on
module webpage)
Harsanyi, John. 1992. “Game and Decision Theoretic Models in Ethics.” In R.J. Aumann & S. Hart
(ed.) Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications. Amsterdam: North Holland, chapter
19, pages 669-707.
Verbeek, Bruno. 2001. "Consequentialism, Rationality and the Relevant Description of
Outcomes." Economics and Philosophy 17: 181-205.
Week 3: Individual Choice and Rationality II
Fabienne Peter (Phil)
Core reading:
Hausman, Daniel. 2012. Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare, chapters 1 and 2, 4, & 6.
Additional readings:
Broome, John. 2007. “Does Rationality Consist in Responding Correctly to Reasons?” Journal of
Moral Philosophy 4: 349 – 374.
"Reasonable Utility Functions and Playing the Cooperative Way." Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 11 (June 2008): 215-234.
Hausman, Daniel and Michael McPherson. 2006. Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public
Policy, chapters 5 – 7.
List, Christian and Franz Dietrich. 2013. "A Reason-based Theory of Rational Choice." Nous 47(1):
104–13.
Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, chapter 9.
Peter, Fabienne and Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.) 2007. Rationality and Commitment. Oxford:
Oxford University Press (especially chapters by Dan Hausman and Herlinde Pauer-Studer).
Scanlon, Thomas M. 1982. “Contractualism and Utilitarianism.” In Sen and Williams (eds.)
Utilitarianism and Beyond. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 103 – 128.
Sen, Amartya. 1977. “Rational Fools.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6: 317 – 44.
Week 4: Collective Choice and Justice I
Peter Hammond (Econ)
Core Reading:
Gaertner, Wulf. 2006. A Primer in Social Choice Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, chapters
1-3 and 6.
Additional Readings:
Arrow, Kenneth. 1963. Social Choice and Individual Welfare. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fleurbaey, Marc. 2008. “Economics and Economic Justice.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/economic-justice/
Hammond, Peter. 1976. “Equity, Arrow’s Conditions, and Rawls’ Difference
Principle.” Econometrica 44: 793 – 804.
Hammond, Peter. 1981. Welfare Economic Theory. Manuscript. Chapter 9. (available on module
webpage).
Sen, Amartya. 1995. “Rationality and Social Choice.” American Economic Review 85: 1 – 24.
Week 5: Collective Choice and Justice II
Fabienne Peter (Phil)
Core reading:
Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp.
39 – 66 (feel free to read more!).
Additional Readings:
Binmore, Ken. 2005. Natural Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fleurbaey, Marc, Maurice Salles and John A. Weymark (eds.) 2008. Justice, Political Liberalism,
and Utilitarianism: Themes from Harsanyi and Rawls.
Harsanyi, John. 1982. “Morality and the Theory of Rational Behavior.” In Sen, Amartya and
Bernard Williams (eds.) Utilitarianism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39
– 63.
Hausman, Daniel and Michael McPherson. 2006. Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public
Policy, chapters 5 – 7.
Peter, Fabienne. 2009. “Rawlsian Justice.” In Paul Anand et al. (eds.) Handbook of Rational and
Social Choice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Picketty, Thomas. 2015. "Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on
Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Journal of Economic Perspectives 29(1): 67–88.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Roemer, John. 1996. Theories of Distributive Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sen, Amartya. 2009. The Idea of Justice. London: Allen Lane, esp. chapters 2 – 4.
See also Amartya Sen’s LSE lecture on his The Idea of
Justice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zy7b1twFxw
Week 7: Markets and their Ethical Limitations I
Peter Hammond (Econ)
Core reading:
Hammond, Peter. Theoretical Principles for Economic Policy, chapter 1.
Additional readings:
Hammond, Peter. “Credible Liberalization: Beyond the three theorems of neoclassical welfare
economics,” in D. Bös (ed.), Economics in a Changing World, Vol. 3: Public Policy and Economic
Organization (IEA Conference Volume No. 109) (London: Macmillan, 1993), ch. 3, pp. 21–39.
Preprint available at:http://web.stanford.edu/~hammond/CredLib.pdf
Hammond, Peter and Jaume Sempere. “Limits to the Potential Gains from Economic Integration
and Other Supply Side Policies,” Economic Journal 105 (1995), 1180–
1204. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00130133%28199509%29105%3C1180%3ALTTPGF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A
Hammond, Peter. “The International Allocation of Labour,” in Europa, migrazione e lavoro [Europe,
Migration and Labour] (Milan: Giuffrè Editore, 2000), pp. 153–161. Preprint available
at: http://web.stanford.edu/~hammond/labAlloc.pdf
James A. Mirrlees, Nobel Lecture 1996. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economicsciences/laureates/1996/mirrlees-lecture.pdf
Week 8: Markets and their Ethical Limitations II
Fabienne Peter (Phil)
Core reading
Satz, Debra. 2012. Why Some Things are Not for Sale. New York: OUP, chapter 1 (e-book).
Additional readings
Anderson, Elizabeth. 1990. “Ethical Limitations of Markets. Economics and Philosophy 6(2): 179 –
205.
Friedman, Milton. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gauthier, David. 1987. “The Market: Freedom from Morality.” In Morals by Agreement, chapter 4.
Hausman, Daniel and Michael McPherson. 2006. Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public
Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, chapters 9 and 10 and section 13.4.
Hayek, Friedrich. 2002 [1968]. “Competition as a Discovery Procedure.” Quarterly Journal of
Austrian Economics 5(3): 9 – 23.
Hussain, Waheed 2012. "Is Ethical Consumerism an Impermissible Form of
Vigilantism?" Philosophy and Public Affairs 40 (2):111-143.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell.
Peter, Fabienne. 2004. “Choice, Consent, and the Legitimacy of Market Transactions.” Economics
and Philosophy 20(1): 1-18.
Sandel, Michael. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. London: Allen Lane.
Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 1999 [1776]. London: Penguin.
Tomasi, John. 2012. Free Market Fairness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
See also Michael Sandel’s TED talk on the ethics of markets:
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_why_we_shouldn_t_trust_markets_with_our_civic_life?
language=en
Week 9: Welfare and Welfare Measurement I
Peter Hammond (Econ)
Core reading:
Gaertner, Wulf. 2006. A Primer in Social Choice Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, chapters
7& 9.
Additional readings:
Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (Sarkozy
Commission). 2009. Background Document by Marc Fleurbaey.
Available at
http://www.insee.fr/fr/publications-et-services/dossiers_web/stiglitz/doccommission/Individual_Well-Being_and_Social_Welfare.pdf.
Canning, David (2013) "Axiomatic Foundations for Cost-effectiveness Analysis” Health Economics,
Volume 22, Issue 12, pages 1405–1416, December.
Hammond, Peter (with Federica Liberini and Eugenio Proto) “Individual Welfare and Subjective
Well-Being: Comments on ‘Subjective Well-Being, Income, Economic Development and Growth’ by
Daniel W. Sacks, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers,” in Claudia Sepúlveda, Ann Harrison, and
Justin Yifu Lin (eds.) ABCDE 2011: Development Challenges in a Postcrisis World (Washington, DC:
World Bank, 2013) pp. 339–353 (available
at:http://web.stanford.edu/~hammond/hammLibProto.pdf).
Hammond, Peter (with Federica Liberini and Eugenio Proto) “Do Happier Britons Have More
Income? First-Order Stochastic Dominance Relations” CAGE Online Working Paper 165,
Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, University of Warwick, 2013; revised 2014
(available from:https://site.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/hammond2014site8.pdf).
Stiglitz, Joseph E. and Amartya Sen. 2010. Mis-Measuring Our Lives.New York: New Press.
Week 10: Welfare and Welfare Measurement II
Fabienne Peter (Phil)
Core reading:
Sen, Amartya. 2009. The Idea of Justice. London: Allen Lane, chapters 11 – 13.
Additional readings:
Fleurbaey, Marc. 2012. “Importance of What People Care About.” Available at:
http://ppe.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/06/14/1470594X12447775.abstract?rss=1
Griffin, James. 1986. Well-being. Oxford: Oxford University Press, part I.
Hausman, Daniel and Michael McPherson. 2006. Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public
Policy, chapter 8.
Hausman, Daniel. 2012. Preference, Value, Choice, And Welfare, part II.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2000. Women and Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Nussbaum, Martha and Amartya Sen (eds.) 1993. Quality of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pettit, Philip. 2001. “Capability and Freedom: A Defence of Sen.” Economics and Philosophy 17: 1
– 20.
Sen, Amartya. 1979. “Personal Utilities and Public Judgements: Or What's Wrong With Welfare
Economics?” The Economic Journal 89: 537 – 558.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf, especially chapters 1, 2, and 4.
Van Hees, Martin. 2013. “Rights, Goals, Capabilities.” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 12(3):
247 – 259.
Here you can find a series of talks given at a recent conference on well-being and public
policy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJjMr3T2M7GtNwTY2YtTa0r5S-46VjMV.