Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Consequentialism

  • Utilitarians aren’t psychopaths–are they?

    Mark D. White The Economist published a short note recently summarizing the results of a forthcoming paper in Cognition that reports that experiment participants "who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness" (from the paper abstract). The experimenters presented subjects with variants of trolley dilemmas–either…

  • The End of Cost-Benefit Analysis?

    Mark D. White Today, the editors of The Wall Street Journal commented on the fine print of President Obama's recent executive order requiring all regulatory agencies to submit their rules to cost-benefit analysis in an effort to streamline government and reduce regulatory burden on business. They note that the order requires that agencies include in…

  • Does health (or health care) have special moral status?

    Mark D. White I just came across a fascinating paper titled "Is Health (Really) Special? Health Policy Between Rawlsian and Luck Egalitarian Justice" by Shlomi Segall (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. From the abstract: In recent work, Norman Daniels extends the application of Rawls's principle of "fair equality of opportunity"…

  • No, Professor Krugman, Economics Is a Morality Play

    Mark D. White I usually try to ignore Paul Krugman, but sometimes I can't. (Sorry.) Thanks to Steve Horwitz (here and here), I lit upon Krugman's September 28 New York Times blog post, "Economics Is Not a Morality Play," in which he writes: The market economy is a system for organizing activity — a pretty good…

  • An unintentional survey of the ethics of gays in the military in the WSJ

    Mark D. White In today's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens has a piece arguing why the GOP should let "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT) lapse in the 2011 Defense Bill, and in it he happens to cover the three mainstream approaches to ethics: consequentialism (DADT forces the expulsion or rejection of qualified, eager men and…

  • That oldtime utilitarian economics (no, thank you) [UPDATED AGAIN]

    Mark D. White The Wall Street Journal today features a paean to A.C. Pigou and good old-fashioned utilitarian economics, written by John Cassidy, author of How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. To Cassidy's (or the editors') credit, statements from other economists (such as Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises) are included for counterpoint,…