I was not suggesting a trade-off of that sort Roy.  I was simply suggesting that one can comment on one set of policies supported by a person without being presumed to endorse a second set of policies supported by the same person.

I might think Russ Feingold was great on the Patriot Act, but that, in and of itself, doesn't mean I support his views on fiscal or monetary policy.  As others have noted, that Friedman letter is clearly written in the context of economic policies, so his endorsement of those should not be taken to mean endorsement of anything else Pinochet did.

Again, it's not about making trade-offs to render an ethical judgment.  It's about what is said not having any necessary implications for what is not said.  It's also about reading the statements of economists in the larger historical context of their work as a way to see whether an inference about other policies is warranted or not.  

And your Bush/airplane example is particularly inapt as a criticism of my argument, given what I've publicly written about that issue and the silliness of that kind of trade-off argument.

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of E. Roy Weintraub
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2011 11:04 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] RVW -- Diamond on Emmett, ed., _The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics _

>> Horwitz wrote:

>>
>> Is it not possible for someone to say of regime X that he or she thinks
>> policies A and B are good without also endorsing policies C and D?


Actually, no.  These kinds of trade-off of good for bad, cost-benefit
calculations of a utilitarian sort in ethical argumentation, are quite
dubious. That they commend themselves to economists is unfortunate.
"Exactly how many dead kulaks will it take to increase agricultural
yields by 5%, Mr. Stalin?"  "Just how much personal liberty should one
be deprived of to lower the probability of an airplane hijacking by
10%, Mr. Bush?" Rawlsian ideas suggest lexographic orderings of such
social choices, but there is a huge literature concerned with such
matters. And as someone wrote earlier, this was the pivotal concern of
the Nurenburg Tribunal.

-- 
E. Roy Weintraub
Professor of Economics
Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy
Duke University
www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html