Comments Elsewhere

Schuele claimed that laws against suicide might be “economically efficient.” In ordinary language, “efficient” is a normative term, not a purely positive one; “efficiency” is a virtue and “inefficiency” a vice in any method that can be so described.

Of course, you could claim that the “economically” qualifier indicates a term of art, not the ordinary language use. Fine, but the technical definitions of both Pareto efficiency and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency typically appeal directly to normative categories such as “better off,” “worse off,” “wealth,” etc.

Exercise for the writer: give me a definition of “economic efficiency” that both (1) makes it a positive rather than a normative category, and (2) justifies the normal use of the term in economic analysis and advocacy. (Until you have done so, your claim that Kennedy is confusing positive and normative claims seems unfounded.)