Abstract

it is a pleasant task to reflect on these thoughtful comments on my Coss lecture. Their gracious reception of an economist into the world of philosophy is an added bonus.Let me leave to one side—for the moment—the main title of my paper, and focus on the subtitle: “the collective construction of rules to live by.” Here, we find my core interest in both economics and philosophy. Beginning around the middle of the twentieth century, economists claimed to have the necessary tools for deriving the optimal rules to live by. Once that claim was taken seriously by the profession, it became accepted practice for economists to become advocates for those decision rules. More correctly, economists became advocates for a..