Efficiency, Morality, and Rights: The Significance of 'Cleaning Up'
18 Pages Posted: 30 Dec 2021
Date Written: 1987
Abstract
The ultimate challenge in moral theory is to find a single criterion for moral judgment, a criterion that reconciles disparate moral intuitions and gives guidance in the solution of moral dilemmas. Such a criterion would have to be simultaneously descriptive and normative. It would have to fit and explain moral intuitions and at the same time represent a standard for correctness in moral judgment. Many contemporary writers despair of finding such a criterion and some argue that the task itself is impossible. According to Lloyd Cohen, even Richard Posner fears to tread the high ground of moral metatheory in his original formulation of the wealth maximization criterion.
Professor Cohen's article, A Justification of Social Wealth Maximization as a Rights Based Ethical Theory, is therefore remarkably ambitious. It aims to accomplish several jobs, including the development of an all-encompassing moral metatheory, with brief and efficient arguments. The arguments are imaginative as well as efficient.
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