Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T19:10:47.664Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Preferences Opposed to the Market: Grasshoppers vs. Ants on Security, Inequality, and Justice*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

David Braybrooke
Affiliation:
Philosophy and Political Science, Dalhousie University

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Gauthier, David, “Justified Inequality?,” Dialogue, 1982, 21(3), pp. 431443CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 433.

2 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 151.Google Scholar

3 Milleron, J.-C., “Theory of Value with Public Goods,” Journal of Economic Theory, 1972, 5(3), pp. 419–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar (which draws on work by Malinvaud).

4 In this passage, I am responding to some illuminating comments by Sheldon Wein on the Grasshoppers' competitive position when the Ants acquire capital.

5 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 131.Google Scholar

6 “The Ethics of Competition,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1923, 37, pp. 579–624; reprinted in The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935).

7 This is a point that I owe to Sheldon Wein.

8 Nozick, , op cit., p. 177 ff.Google Scholar Nozick leaves the proviso otherwise indeterminate when he sets aside (p. 177) the task of relating a “base line” to “original appropriation” (itself a dubious notion).

9 An American general, in the course of defending the pacification, estimated 616,000 dead in Luzon alone – one-sixth of the population – by May 1901 ( Schirmer, Daniel B., Republic or Empire, 1972, p. 231Google Scholar). This estimate has appeared exaggerated to others, including some severe critics of the pacification. Wolff, Leon, in Little Brown Brother, 1961Google Scholar, sclaims 250,000 dead all told, including 16,000 counted as killed in action by the United States army, plus 20,000 killed but not counted, plus 200,000 civilians dead of famine and pestilence.

10 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 1651, Chap. 14.Google Scholar

11 Thurow, Lester C., Generating Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 149154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Buchanan, James M. and Tullock, Gordon, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 192193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar