Based on Hume's major philosophical works and on some of his Essays, this paper discusses formally the feasibility, from a Humean point of view, of a welfare policy which would aim at promoting the highest individual happiness whereas individual decisions, like individual happiness, are...

Information and Risk in the Medieval Doctrine of Usury during the Thirteenth Century

The few pages that Adam Smith devoted to lotteries, mainly in the Wealth of Nations (1776) did not receive much attention. They nonetheless constituted an opportunity to introduce a sophisticated analysis of individual decision under risk. Through various examples, Smith pointed out a...

This paper provides a general framework for a unifying treatment of stochastic dominance of any degree and of any type (direct or inverse for each final or intermediary level). It gives the conditions for the congruence between stochastic dominance and classes of utility functions in this...

Facing R. Sugden's criticism of our interpretation, it is shown in this paper that rationality appears as a possible consequence of Hume's theory of choice. We first argue that Sugden's dismissal of the preference relation from the type of rationality through which Hume's theory is apprehended,...

This paper reconsiders the debate over the nature of Ricardian economics, chiefly based on the interpretation of Ricardo's Essay on Profits, that raged during the 1970's. This debate opposed a Sraffian view, in the line of Sraffa's 1951 well known Introduction to Ricardo, and a non-Sraffian...

This paper aims at exploring, in a formal way, Bentham's statement that “the pleasure of gaining is not equal to the evil of losing”, which belongs to those aspects of the principle of utility left aside by Jevon's reconstruction. Consequently, the agent's preference order will be viewed as...

The question of choice, in Hume's works, lies within the more general framework of the theory of passions. These lead towards desire, aversion and volition, and require reason, as a cognitive faculty, in order to build the set of objects on which our preferences are defined, and to determine its...

L'aversion de l'auteur de la Richesse des Nations à l'égard de l'esclavage ne fait guère de doute et se double d'une argumentation économique. Comme celle de ses successeurs, jusqu'à Ricardo, Mill, puis Cairnes, l'argumentation de Smith conduit à conclure à l'inefficacité de l'esclavage...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce explicitly pleasure and belief in what aims at being a Humean theory of decision, like the one developed in Diaye and Lapidus (2005a). Although we support the idea that Hume was in some way a hedonist – evidently different from Bentham's or Jevons' way...