Chapter Oltre all’utilitarismo. La critica di Keynes dell’uomo economico benthamiano

Abstract

Keynes’s ethics is an ethics of virtues in the way ancient Greeks understood it. It emphasises the importance of friendship, moral emotions and pays precise attention to the contextual relativity of right action and conduct. A good life is a life worth being lived, that is a moral life: to be good is more important than to do good. Keynes accepts the Aristotelian notion of the good and happy life. Keynes’s notion of happiness also recalls Aristotle’s happiness (eudaimonia). In line with Aristotle, Keynes believes that a good life has necessary material and institutional conditions. A good life requires material prerequisites for human flourishing. For Keynes, the tasks of political economy as a moral science and of economic policy, are precisely to supply these material conditions for good and happy life: they are its necessary material preconditions. Employment is one of those.