On Keynes’s Ethics as Eudaimonia

Abstract

AbstractIn ethics, John Maynard Keynes distinguishes between speculative ethics and practical ethics or morals. Speculative ethics concerns ultimate ends and values that are intrinsically good: what in his 1938 paper My Early Beliefs he called his religion, a religion that he got from G. E. Moore. Practical ethics concerns itself with conduct, probability and economics. In his speculative ethics, Keynes believes in the existence of a plurality of heterogeneous ends and values. This is also true for his view on aesthetics. He sees many different kinds of beauty as of virtue. On pluralism Keynes follows Aristotle rather than Plato. Aristotle stresses the plurality and variety of goodness and the fact that good is not reducible to a univocal scale. On the contrary, Platonic tradition—as does utilitarianism—accepts the idea of a uniqueness of ends and values: it reduces goodness to one dimension alone.