THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS VOLUME 22 | No. 2 | 139–180 | SUMMER 2019 WWW.QJAE.ORG Keynes and the Ethics of Socialism Edward W. Fuller* JEL Classification: B22, B24, E12, P20 Abstract: This paper examines John Maynard Keynes’s ethical theory and how it relates to his politico-economic thought. Keynes’s ethical theory represents an attack on all general rules. Since capitalism is a rule-based social system, Keynes’s ethical theory is incompatible with capitalism. And since socialism rejects the general rules of private property, the Keynesian ethical theory is consistent with socialism. The unexplored evidence presented here confirms Keynes advocated a consistent form of non-Marxist socialism from no later than 1907 until his death in 1946. However, Keynes’s ethical theory is flawed because it is based on his defective logical theory of probability. Consequently, Keynes’s ethical theory is not a viable ethical justification for socialism. INTRODUCTION ohn Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was the most influential Jeconomist of the twentieth century. However, ethics and prob- ability were Keynes’s primary intellectual interests for the first seventeen years of his academic career. In fact, his early ideas on ethics and probability inspired and suffused his politico-economic theory. His biographer, Robert Skidelsky, agrees: “His theories of politics and economics were expressions of his beliefs about ethics * Edward W. Fuller (
[email protected]), MBA, is a graduate of the Leavey School of Business. Quart J Austrian Econ (2019) 22.2:139–180 https://qjae.scholasticahq.com/ 139 Creative Commons doi.org/10.35297/qjae.010010 BY-NC-ND 4.0 License 140 Quart J Austrian Econ (2019) 22.2:139–180 and probability” (1991, 104).