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Spanakopita Two What Should We Be Doing? It was another Wednesday, and Adam seated himself by the window waiting for his all-too-substantial friend to join him in the red leatherette booth. Idly, he wondered if in a wrestling match he could pin Dessie to the mat and concluded that he could not. It would not be dif‹cult to fell him with a sudden unexpected header to the stomach, but it would be impossible to keep this slippery adversary down long enough to pin both shoulders ›at on the mat. Just at that moment, Dessie appeared in the doorway, blinking his way toward the booth they usually shared. “You preceded me again. What’s happening?” he asked as he caught his breath. “There is no strategic advantage in being ‹rst,” said Adam. “It is only God’s Boolean order—that’s Boolean, not Boola Boola. Did you know that there is a crumb cake called ‘Ultimate?’” “Crumbs, I know about; cake is something else,” said Dessie. “I thought you were shy about the ultimates of this world. But since you brought it up, are we agreed that happiness and human development are ultimate goods?” Dessie had hardly settled into the booth before he launched into his missionary work. Adam smiled. There was old Dessie at it again. But why not; it was as much fun talking about the ends of life as about his colleagues—well, almost as much fun. “Last time you said we would talk about what we should be doing, what is worth doing. I thought last time that this topic had a noble ring, but I confess I fear talk about ‘love thy neighbor,’ 19 agape, and that punctual friend of yours whom I quoted last time, Immanuel Kant. I would like to say one more thing about your friend Kant: It is really pretty empty to say that the dignity of humans is the end toward which we should strive, for it tells us nothing about how to go about it. Every day I have a choice between seeing more students and ‹nishing my article on utility maximization in the professions. So, if I act as though my act were embodied in a universal law, either I treat my students as the means of getting a livelihood while I seek glory in some obscure economic journal, or I treat the members of my ‘invisible college’ as a means of getting tenure so I can teach my students. Throw a highsounding word such as dignity at you guys and you’ll gnaw on it for centuries .” Adam never minded mixing metaphors. “You mean we concern ourselves with eternal problems,” said Dessie with a trace of irritation. “Would it be better if we dealt only with ephemeral problems? I doubt if you can even ask, let alone answer, questions about what we should be doing without referring to some such concepts as ‘the good.’” “I’ve been thinking about the hidden meanings of the word good,” said Adam. “What was it that Charles Stevenson said about moral words? They are ‘aha’ expressions designed to give an affective glow to people who use them—something like that.1 I fear the easy use of good.” “You can’t avoid it, even if you talk only about the means to some end. For one thing, evaluation is built into our systems. For example, the good-bad dimension is the ‹rst in a factor analysis of the connotative meanings of words and comes easily to the mind as well as the tongue.2 Also, whatever may be the implications of rational choice, the ‹rst evaluations that come to mind are largely emotive; only later, if at all, do cognitive judgments supersede them.”3 Dessie paused for a moment to consider where the trouble lay. “You know,” he continued, “I think your problem is special to your discipline. Political theory deals with the philosophical implications of political practice; sociology treats concepts of the good society without embarrassment; and in psychology, the least well integrated of the social sciences, there is a fairly substantial attention given to mental health and to the development of effective, moral people .4 Welfare economics, however, accepts the narrower limits of positive economics. Tjalling Koopmans says that ‘in de‹ning normative economics , we say that we seek clari‹cation as to what are, according to some suitable criterion, best ways of satisfying human wants, starting from a given state of knowledge and experience,’5 but...

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