“I’m just being honest.” Ethical justifications enable interpersonal harm

The importance of being honest

This paper analyzes the case of a principal who wants to give an agent proper incentives to investigate a hypothesis which can be either true or false. The agent can shirk, thus never proving the hypothesis, or he can avail himself of a known technology to produce fake successes. This latter option either makes the provision of incentives for honesty impossible, or does not distort its costs at...

The Importance of Being Honest*

Given individual propensities to cheat (stealing, overcharging, etc.), the optimality conditions for the amount of resources devoted to law enforcement and for the severity o f penalties on convicted cheats are derived. In some interesting cases, the optimal penalty equals the market price divided by the probability of conviction and it is optimal to spend very little on enforcement and impose ...

Being Just With Deconstruction

Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-being

This paper, which is to be published as a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, provides an introduction to social-choice theory with interpersonal comparisons of well-being. We argue that the most promising route of escape from the negative conclusion of Arrow’s theorem is to use a richer informational environment than ordinal measurability and the absence of interpersonal compa...

Self-harm: Interpersonal and holistic perspectives

Delia Latina (2016): Self-harm: Interpersonal and holistic perspectives. Örebro Studies in Psychology 35. Who are the adolescents who purposely cut or burn their wrists, arms, or some other parts of their body? The fundamental question I raise in this dissertation is whether or not the portrait of self-harming adolescents as being exposed to others’ hostility in their everyday life environments...