ABSTRACT

This chapter raises some basic questions about market principles of allocation and suggests how the individual's freedom to pursue his own interests—even when equality of resources already exists—can result in everyone's being worse off. One solution to the problem of equality and efficiency is to try to assure a fair distribution of resources through political action, and then to rely on a free market of choices for allocating those resources among different individuals and groups. Biological evolution involves the responses of billions of individuals, each going about his own business, most of them—from the amoeba to the giraffe—without the slightest idea that they are engaged together in selective adaptation, separation of species, survival, and extinction. Virtue may be its own reward, but the reward is too often a collective good, shared only minutely by the virtuous individual. And indeed a good deal of social ethics is concerned with rules of behavior that are collectively rewarding if collectively obeyed.