Economics with(out) ethics? An interdisciplinary encounter between public economists and John Rawls in the 1970s

This article analyses selected interdisciplinary exchanges between analytical political philosophy and public economics in the United States during the 1970s. It focuses on three core themes in which public economists interpreted, discussed, and incorporated concepts from John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), namely: (1) the limits and uses of utilitarianism as a useful framework for capturing social welfare; (2) the ethics of promoting justice and fairness; and (3) how to promote redistribution through taxation. An exploration of published and unpublished sources (personal correspondence, articles, and books) following the publication of Rawls’s magnum opus reveals an intense engagement from public economists with key Rawlsian concepts in the 1970s, in particular the “maximin.” Whilst such exchange offered important thematic inspiration for making the field more ethically driven and engaged with justice-related issues, generating policy discussions on promoting redistribution through optimal taxation, their exchange remained within the economist’s formal toolbox and way of reasoning. Political philosophy made public economics to become ethical without challenging the core epistemic-methodological foundations of economic reasoning.