G. E. Moore and J. M. Keynes: A Missing Chapter in the History of the Expected Utility Model
Author(s)
Bateman, Bradley W.
Abstract
In his posthumous essay “My Early Beliefs” John Maynard Keynes outlined his “mental history in the dozen years before the war” and asserted their importance to his later life. Yet despite Keynes’s assertion of the importance of this part of his “mental history” to who he was and what he did in 1938 (the year the essay was written and two years after he published The General Economic Theory), there is virtually no treatment in the history of economic thought of this period of his life or of its impact on his economic theory. The purpose of the essay is to treat an episode of that period of his life which has particular analytical importance and to suggest some ways in which it might contribute to a clearer understanding of his later work in economics. The episode in Keynes’s early life which this essay examines is his role in G.E. Moore’s changing opinion about the importance of rules in ethics. In his classic Principia Ethica (1903) Moore had originally asserted that obeying certain rules is a necessary part of ethically correct behavior; but in his Ethics (1912) he makes exactly the opposite argument saying that individuals are always justified in judging a case for themselves and are under no obligation to follow general rules of conduct. Moore switched from a rule utilitarian argument to an act utilitarian argument. The first four sections of this essay detail the role which Keynes played in Moore’s change of heart. The final section discusses how the episode affects our understanding of Keynes’ work in economics.
