Moral Objectives, Rules, and the Forms of Social Change

Fruit from forty years' writing, these essays by David Braybrooke take up an assortment of practical concerns that ethics brings into politics: people's interests; needs along with preferences; work and commitment to work; participation in social life. Essays follow on justice and the common good. Parts II and III of the book deal with settled social rules, devices for securing the objectives just treated. Part II shows that rules go hand in hand with virtues, and, in social phenomena, with causal regularities. Part III captures dialectic in history in a logical analysis of how rules (policies) can be prudent by keeping within incremental limits, yet imaginative enough to escape the recent embarrassments generated by social choice theory.