PRESENTATION

Chapter 22 focused on economic ethics that are, one way or the other, closely related to the obtained results as concerns macrojustice. Chapters 23 and 24 considered the general logical and necessary structure of economic ethical principles, and its various specific manifestations as concerns the structure and the “substance” of the families of criteria. This chapter and the next consider specific principles, respectively based on freedom and on preferences. Freedom is the basis of a variety of basic criteria. Among them, responsibility, desert, and merit relate judgment or allocation to the individual's action. Others consist of specifying the relevant meaning of equal freedom – the concepts of equality of opportunity are among them. Other principles propose that what should exist is what the individuals would have chosen in a putative free choice. When this notional choice is a collective free agreement, this is a theory of the social contract. This includes, in particular,“liberal social contracts” (see Chapter 3), and “fundamental insurance” against the occurrence of facts that are in reality given (theories of the “original position” are particular cases). Of course, rights, the scope of opportunities, responsibility, desert, merit, and social contracts have been the object of social-ethical analysis for centuries. They are forms of the most individualistic social ethics. Yet, the vastly unequal wealths that can result from equal social freedom in free markets led to claims of tangible equality or lower inequality, in the outcome.