Edward Skidelsky

• University of Exeter

It is often claimed that the core moral concepts are universal, though the words used to articulate them have changed significantly. I reject this claim. Concepts cannot be disentangled from words; as these latter change, they change too. Thus the philosophical analysis of moral concepts cannot overlook the history of the words by which these conce...

I argue that the project of moral enhancement is incipiently contradictory. All our judgements of human excellence and deficiency rest on what I call the human “form of life”, meaning that a radical transformation of this form of life, such as is envisioned by advocates of moral enhancement, would undermine the basis of those judgements. It follows...

This paper argues that happiness and pleasure are distinct states of mind because they stand in a distinct logical relation to belief. Roughly, being happy about a state of affairs s implies that one believes that s satisfies the description ‘s’ and that it is in some way good, whereas taking pleasure in s does not. In particular, Fred Feldman's an...

The question I have in mind relates to the general title we have been given of ‘Markets and Morals’. The question is: what exactly are the harms that markets do? By ‘markets’ I mean buying and selling goods and services.

Actually, I hesitate to start on this topic of the meaning of money, because not only am I here with all of you, who are real experts, much more expert than I am and proper scholars, and I am basically just a bit of a yahoo, a practitioner in the world of money — I run a bond fund — but also because I am aware that in no other field than money is t...

This is going to be a continuation of the discussion before lunch. In that discussion we heard about two different arguments, or kinds of argument, for calling a market ‘noxious’: an argument from equality and an argument from corruption. A market can be called noxious because it undermines human equality, either because some of its participants ar...

My interest in insatiability was triggered off by Keynes’s prediction in 1930 that 100 years hence people in rich countries would have enough, and therefore work less. This was based on an assumption about productivity growth. That prediction turned out to be partly wrong. Although average incomes have risen, much in line with Keynes’s prediction,...

What happens to the morality of a society in which money rules the roost? In this book, over a dozen philosophers and economists come together to examine the consequences of living in a society in which exchanges between people increasingly take the form of buying and selling goods and services for money. Based on conference papers and discussions,...

Money has always inspired obsession, both in those who amass it and in those who think about it. “Man will never be able to know what money is any more than he will be able to know what God is,” wrote the French financier Marcel Labordère to his friend John Maynard Keynes. The analogy is apt. Money, like God, injects infinity into human desires. To...

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. by MichaelSandel. Allen Lane, 2012. 272pp, £11.99 ISBN: 9781846144714 - Volume 88 Issue 1 - Chris Edward Skidelsky

Analyzes questions that arose from the 2008 financial crisis while assessing the predictions of John Maynard Keynes, sharing the authors' views of a positive life and how recent generations have traded morality for wealth.

This is the first English-language intellectual biography of the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a leading figure on the Weimar intellectual scene and one of the last and finest representatives of the liberal-idealist tradition. Edward Skidelsky traces the development of Cassirer's thought in its historical and intellectual se...

The first principle of economics, wrote F.Y. Edgeworth in 1881, is that “every agent is actuated only by self-interest.” Edgeworth’s principle has hung like a cross round the necks of economists ever since. Taken as literally descriptive, it implies an intolerably cynical view of humankind. Yet taken as a purely theoretical postulate, it is unclear...

In 1973, the philosopher George Dickie proposed an ingenious new answer to the old question: what is art? Arthood, he suggested, is not an intrinsic property of objects, but a status conferred upon them by the institutions of the art world. He accordingly attached an exemplary significance to works like Duchamp's urinal, whose very lack of intrinsi...

In 1958, the Oxford philosopher G. J. Warnock opened his survey of twentieth-century English philosophy with some disparaging comments on British Idealism. It was, he writes, "an exotic in the English scene, the product of a quite recent revolution in ways of thought due primarily to German influences." Analytic philosophy, by contrast, represents...

The sociologist Georg Simmel and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer developed strikingly similar theories of modernity. Both viewed the transition from a substantialist to a functionalist view of the world as the modern age's distinguishing characteristic. But they interpreted this transition from very different philosophical perspectives. Simmel subsc...

Common Knowledge 9.2 (2003) 186-198 Regicide, matricide, parricide, ecocide... the suffix cide has had an especially brilliant career since 1944, when the word genocide was introduced by Raphael Lemkin, an American lawyer of Polish extraction. At the commencement of our new century, I would like to propose, generalizing from the rich criminal exper...