Why Economics Is a Moral Science
The paper argues that the attempt to relocate economics from the domain of the moral sciences to one closer to that of the natural sciences necessarily meant that free will, intentionality and moral judgment were excluded from its purview. However, the re
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Why Economics Is a Moral Science Peter Rona
Abstract The paper argues that the attempt to relocate economics from the domain of the moral sciences to one closer to that of the natural sciences necessarily meant that free will, intentionality and moral judgment were excluded from its purview. However, the resulting surrogate reality has proven to be less than satisfactory because economic life is simultaneously about what should be as well as what is. Because economic life is lived with a purpose in mind, economic ‘facts’ are interwoven with intentionality. Attempts to reconstruct economics as a moral science show how utility calculations and moral considerations co-determine the behavior of economic agents, and throw light on the deep connection between virtue ethics and all levels of economic activity as well as the deleterious consequences when that connection is impaired or severed.
“Moral sciences” as a designation of a field of inquiry came into widespread usage following the Scottish Enlightenment, reached the peak of its popularity during the last third of the nineteenth century, and – despite the important efforts of John Maynard Keynes and Kenneth Boulding among others to revive it – the term, together with the concept behind it virtually disappeared by the middle of the 20th. Limited interest in its meaning resurfaced only in the last decade or so. This collection of essays is concerned with reconsidering economics as a moral science in place of its present configuration as a particular form of applied mathematics. Despite the frequent use of the term, the precise scope and meaning of moral science had not been given much systematic attention. In its early career it tended to echo the distinction between natural and moral philosophy, and to rely on the generally accepted contrast between corporeal and incorporeal reality with the moral sciences occupying the latter domain. However, the curriculum actually specified for the tripos in Moral Sciences at Cambridge University provides a fair picture of the scope and content of this subject, and, perhaps more significantly, places economics as the object of inquiry in a context it has lost upon gaining its status as an P. Rona (*) Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 P. Rona, L. Zsolnai (eds.), Economics as a Moral Science, Virtues and Economics 1, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53291-2_1
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a utonomous discipline. The revival of interest in economics as a moral science may be due to the pervasive sense that, as an autonomous science, economics has helped create an unsatisfactory and unjust world despite its contribution to the dramatic betterment of the material existence of many. It has brought about an unwelcome change in the very nature of human existence as it has coerced us to change who we are and who we would like to be in order to conform to its ill-conceived ideals of economic rationality, built on a diminished, severely reductionist notion of our humanity. T
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