ABSTRACT
You asked initially if I could tell you about how I ended up doing economics and, more specifically, how I came to develop social choice theory and got interested in ethics at all.1
To say that I’m interested in ethics is probably just to say I’m a human being. You’re brought up full of ethical concern; these things are part and parcel of life. The real issue is whether you think about ethical concerns rather than just accept them. Will you raise the level of consciousness? Of course, if you raise the level of consciousness there’s some kind of dilemma. You find yourself with something that doesn’t seem quite as straightforward as you thought. This is a very general observation. It doesn’t speak to right and wrong, which are part and parcel of my past attitudes. This sometimes leads to counterintuitive things like trying to take advantage of immediate situations. I was, for whatever reason, concerned from a pretty early age about issues like poverty, the inequality of income, topics like racial bars, which of course were very common in the 1930s when I was coming of age; they were quite overt. Now we have a whole set of techniques in economics for detecting whether racial discrimination exists or not. You didn’t need any of that in the 1930s; everybody was perfectly open about it. Everybody just said there were certain jobs, certain places to live depending on skin color. There was the
racial question, the fact that there are large inequalities of incomea point which came up in the election politics-this took the form for many students, to some extent myself, of being radical on social activities of one kind or another.
