Ethics as social science

The author explores overlaps between economics and ethics. A society's moral climate conditions its degree of economic development and prosperity. Policy recommendations necessarily rest on normative as well as positive judgments. Social science contributes to posing and answering questions about the nature and grounding of ethical precepts. Pursuing these questions leads to an "indirect utilitarianism" incorporating insights of David Hume, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F. A. Hayek. Criticisms of this approach are answered, including charges that it is collectivistically aggregative, is vacuous, makes a fetish of rules, and encourages immoralities illustrated by "lifeboat cases". Alternatives to it are also appraised, including the natural-rights and "contractarian" approaches that have found favor with prominent economists. Presidential Address at the Fortieth International Atlantic Economic Conference, Williamsburg, Virginia, October 8–11, 1995.     

Land Restitution in Post-Communist Bulgaria

While international scholarship has generally been laudatory of Bulgaria's land restitution efforts, painting them as part of an overall success story and yet another example of the country's sharp break with communism, a real analysis of Bulgaria's so-called 'success story', particularly by the legal community, has been sorely lacking. This author has found that in many ways the approbation Bulgaria has received from the international community for its restitution efforts is more a reflection of the Bulgarian government's willingness to confront the problem than its ability to effectively deal with it. Through the use of documents, court records, and interviews conducted by the author, this article endeavours to document the problems and shortcomings of a system that is considered such a courageous and worthy pursuit that few have been willing to criticize it. Essentially, this paper attempts to answer the question, not of whether Bulgaria's restitution effort was able to do some good, but whether it could have done--and could still do--much better.