Among the most serious efforts to settle ethical questions by economic reasoning is the Economic Analysis of Law. Richard Posner, a cultured and sophisticated professor of law at Chicago, led a movement which has undertaken a wide-ranging description and evaluation of legal arrangements in terms of their economic efficiency (maximisation of social wealth, particularly by minimisation of wasted ‘transaction costs’). At the movement's zenith, Posner himself proposed that the ethics of wealth maximisation is superior to other aggregative theories of morality, notably utilitarianism, and provides ‘a comprehensive and unitary criterion of rights and duties’ (Posner 1979, 140). Some of its results — such as that ‘people who are very poor … count only if they are part of the utility function of someone who has wealth’ — do (he conceded) ‘grate on modern sensibilities’; but none of its positions or implications, he urged, are ‘violently inconsistent with our common moral intuitions’ (ibid., 128, 131). Ten years later, and now a high-ranking federal judge, Posner withdrew his claim that Economic Analysis of Law affords an appropriate ‘comprehensive criterion’ of moral judgment, and conceded that it is open to criticisms which cannot be answered. One may doubt the philosophical depth of his formulation of the deepest criticism: that wealth maximisation's potential for approving slavery is ‘contrary to the unshakable moral intuitions of Americans’ (Posner 1990, 377).