I Grew Up In A Jewish Family,

There Is A Tendency To Think That If We Engage Too Directly With Moral Questions In Politics, That's A Recipe For Disagreement, And For That Matter, A Recipe For Intolerance And Coercion.

If You Go Back To Adam Smith, You Find The Idea That Markets And Market Forces Operate As An Invisible Hand. This Is The Traditional Laissez-faire Market Idea. But Today, When Economics Is Increasingly Defined As The Science Of Incentive, It Becomes Clear That The Use Of Incentives Involves Quite Active Intervention, Either By An Economist Or A Policy Maker, In Using Financial Inducements To Motivate Behavior. In Fact, So Much Though That We Now Almost Take For Granted That Incentives Are Central To The Subject Of Economics.

Economics Has Increasingly Become The Science Of Human Behavior In General, And It's All The More Unlikely To Think That It Can Possibly Be Value-free - And, In Fact, It Isn't. Economics Rests On Un-argued Assumptions That Need To Be Examined.

To Argue About Justice Is Unavoidably To Argue About Virtues, About Substantive Moral And Even Spiritual Questions.

I Almost Became A Political Journalist, Having Worked As A Reporter At The Time Of Watergate. The Proximity To Those Events Motivated Me, When I Wound Up Doing Philosophy, To Try To Use It To Move The Public Debate.