Phil 349

• An informal public system applying to all rational persons,governing behavior that affects others.
• Moral rules, ideas and virtues.

• "the philosophical study of morality"
• Morality is the subject-matter of ethics
• An actions ethicists say can be right or wrong;an object,person or state of affairs can be good or evil

• View that there are no unviersally valid moral principles.
• All moral principles are valid relative to culture or individual choice.

• Moral Principles are valid relative to the conventions of a given culture or society.
• W/E a social group or culture accepts is right is automatically right-"for it"

Some moral principles have universal validity- ie. don't kill fellow man

No valid moral principles.

We cannot know whether any moral principle is valid

• Branch of mainstream econ. that takes welfare as its ultimate value.
• Concerned with the meaning of the term 'optimal' and whether given policy or event has improved or reduced social welfare.

• The satisfaction of preferences.(every preference is adaptive).
• Welfare of an individual is defined by what the individual prefers.

Maximizing socail welfare.

The sum of the welfares of all members of a defined society.

next best mutually exclusive choice available.

ability of a party to produce particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost.

• Paternalistic- state institutions have a responsibility to provide minumum lvl of benefits to children.not all parents are willing or aple to indentify childrens "intersts
• Distributive- equality of opportunity requires adequate education for disadvantaged childeren
• Political- students must be prepared for full citizenship,civic responsiblity, and so forth.

• Value
• Welfare
• Happines/absence of pain
• Individual Preference/freedom/effeciency
• Voluntarines

=Unemplyed workers/Total Labour force

due to replacement of workers by machines

Time period between jobs when a worker moves from one job to another

• actions that arise from constraints, preferences, and expectationts(or beliefs).
• Rational if determined by preferences

• Predetermined or given facts about individuals and not theselves in neeed of eplanation or subject to rational appraisal.
• Economic analyses begin with an individual's preferences.
• Are rational if they are transitive and complete

• if preferences are rational and if she chooses what she most prefers among those things she can obatain.
• If preferences are trasitive and complete.
• if his or her prefences may be represented by ordinal utility functions and his or her choices maximize utility.

if for all alternativce x, y, and z if the agent prefers (or is indifferent) x to y and y to z the she preferes (or is indifferent) to x to z

• Under conditions of certainty, if all alternatives are ranked. always able to rank
• For all options x and y either agent prefers x to y or y to x or the agent is indifferent to x and y.

the magnitudes of the utility number, rather than just their order , and sinificanct

the view that people always do what the believe is in their self-interest and human nature being what it is, they cannot do otherwise.

• First Assumption of positive eonomics: Individuals are exclusively self-interested. Rational and self intrested agents always prefer what the believe is better for themselves over what they believe is worse.
• Second Assumption of positive eonomics: individuals have prefect knowledge, ie all info relevant to given exchange. Preferences maximize utility.

Other things being equal, it is a morally good thing if people are better off.

allocation in which it is impossilbe to make anyone better off w/o making someone worse off.

a change that makes some people better-off w/o making anyone worse-off

• There are no interdependencies among peoples utility functions (no i'm happy when u are)
• There are markets for all goods and services(no externalities)
• There are no barriers to entry and exit from any makret; and
• There are so many traders in every market that no one trader can influence prices

there is perfect competition and no excess demands on any market.

The allocation resulting from any perfectly competitive equilibrium among self-interested agernts is Pareto optimal

all pareto optima can be obtained as competitive quilibria from the "right" initial distribution of endowments.

• Trade results in a pareto improvement over a no-trade equilibrium.
• Judgments of prudence, and morality

Prescreptive rules regarding behaviors that are shared among a group of people that are partly sustained by the approval and disapproval of others.

enable people to coordinate their actions more efficiently than would be possible w/o a shared morality.

• The rules it involves are felt to be universl
• People feel that those who commit immoral acts desreve to be punished.
• Moral sense is an innate part of human nature.

Harm, fairnes, community, authority, and purity appear to have deep evolutionary roots.