Download or read book Economics as a Moral Science written by Peter Rona and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is reclaiming economics as a moral science. It argues that ethics is a relevant and inseparable aspect of all levels of economic activity, from individual and organizational to societal and global. Taking ethical considerations into account is needed in explaining and predicting the behavior of economic agents as well as in evaluating and designing economic policies and mechanisms. The unique feature of the book is that it not only analyzes ethics and economics on an abstract level, but puts behavioral, institutional and systemic issues together for a robust and human view of economic functioning. It sees economic “facts” as interwoven with human intentionality and ethical content, a domain where utility calculations and moral considerations co-determine the behavior of economic agents and the outcomes of their activities. The book employs the personalist approach that sees human persons – endowed with free will and conscience – as the basic agents of economic life and defines human flourishing as the final end of economic activities. The book demonstrates that economics can gain a lot in meaning and also in analytical power by reuniting itself with ethics.
Download or read book Economics as Moral Science written by Bernard Hodgson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2001 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economics as Moral Science investigates the problem of the ethical neutrality of "mainstream" economic theory within the context of the methodology of economics as a science. Against the conventional wisdom, the author argues that there are serious moral presuppositions to the theory, but that economics could still count as a scientific or rational form of inquiry. The basic questions addressed - the ethical implications of economics, its status as a scientific mode of theory-construction, and the relation between these factors - are absolutely fundamental ones for an understanding of contemporary economics, the philosophy of the human sciences, and our current market culture. Moreover, the study provides a thorough philosophical analysis of the critical issues at stake from the inside, from the credible perspective of a particular, but foundational economic theory - the neoclassical theory of rational choice.
Download or read book Economics as a Moral Science written by Jeffrey T. Young and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1997 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes new links between the moral theories and the economics of the first articulator of capitalism, arguing that moral questions lie at the heart of positive and normative economic analysis. Examines the methodology and philosophy of Smith's (1723-90) work, questions whether economics can or should be a value-free science, and shows how economics can be a useful tool in solving moral problems. Considers the concept of self- interest, the formation of moral values by individuals and society, the ethical effects of commercial society on the quality of life, justice, fairness, natural liberty, distributive equity, and the common good. Addressed to economists and philosophers. Much of the material has been previously published. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Moral Markets written by Paul J. Zak and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy.
Download or read book Economics of Good and Evil written by Tomas Sedlacek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.
Download or read book The Moral Economy written by Samuel Bowles and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends.
Download or read book The Moral Economists written by Tim Rogan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lens What’s wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century is primarily concerned with disparities in income and wealth. It was not always so. The Moral Economists reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was less important than moral or spiritual desolation. Tim Rogan focuses on three of the twentieth century’s most influential critics of capitalism—R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, and E. P. Thompson. Making arguments about the relationships between economics and ethics in modernity, their works commanded wide readerships, shaped research agendas, and influenced public opinion. Rejecting the social philosophy of laissez-faire but fearing authoritarianism, these writers sought out forms of social solidarity closer than individualism admitted but freer than collectivism allowed. They discovered such solidarities while teaching economics, history, and literature to workers in the north of England and elsewhere. They wrote histories of capitalism to make these solidarities articulate. They used makeshift languages of “tradition” and “custom” to describe them until Thompson patented the idea of the “moral economy.” Their program began as a way of theorizing everything economics left out, but in challenging utilitarian orthodoxy in economics from the outside, they anticipated the work of later innovators inside economics. Examining the moral cornerstones of a twentieth-century critique of capitalism, The Moral Economists explains why this critique fell into disuse, and how it might be reformulated for the twenty-first century.
Download or read book A moral Economics written by Claudia C. Klaver and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A/Moral Economics is an interdisciplinary historical study that examines the ways which social "science" of economics emerged through the discourse of the literary, namely the dominant moral and fictional narrative genres of early and mid-Victorian England. In particular, this book argues that the classical economic theory of early-nineteenth-century England gained its broad cultural authority not directly, through the well- known texts of such canonical economic theorists as David Ricardo, but indirectly through the narratives constructed by Ricardo's popularizers John Ramsey McCulloch and Harriet Martineau. By reexamining the rhetorical and institutional contexts of classical political economy in the nineteenth century, A/Moral Economics repositions the popular writings of both supporters and detractors of political economy as central to early political economists' bids for a cultural voice. The now marginalized economic writings of McCulloch, Martineau, Henry Mayhew, and John Ruskin, as well as the texts of Charles Dickens and J. S. Mill, must be read as constituting in part the entities they have been read as merely criticizing. It is this repressed moral logic that resurfaces in a range of textual contradictions--not only in the writings of Ricardo's supporters, but, ironically, in those of his critics as well.
Download or read book Humanomics written by Vernon L. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Articulates Adam Smith's model of human sociality, illustrated in experimental economic games that relate easily to business and everyday life. Shows how to re-humanize the study of economics in the twenty-first century by integrating Adam Smith's two great books into contemporary empirical analysis.
Download or read book Altruism Morality and Economic Theory written by Edmund S. Phelps and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1975-05-21 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a collection of papers by economists theorizing on the roles of altruism and morality versus self-interest in the shaping of human behavior and institutions. Specifically, the authors examine why some persons behave in an altruistic way without any apparent reward, thus defying the economist's model of utility maximization. The chapters are accompanied by commentaries from representatives of other disciplines, including law and philosophy.
Download or read book Ethics As Social Science written by Leland B. Yeager and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . . . this is a very ambitious book ranging over a great deal of territory and a great number of issues . . . the general perspectives offered are certainly engaging. Alan Hamlin, Journal of Economic Methodology . . . an illuminating book, informed by careful thought and wide-ranging scholarship. David Gordon, The Mises Review Economics claims to be a science of choice and its unintended consequences, but economists sneak moral judgments in through the back door. Ethics, on the other hand, often falters on the stilts of weak economic theories and assumptions. The result economics without ethics is often sterile, and ethics without economics is often incoherent. Severed from one another, each can be dangerously misleading, and each misses the opportunity to better understand the economic and moral complexity behind social cooperation. Ethics as Social Science helps reconcile the two disciplines, and represents years of seasoned, careful thinking on the topic. Using clear, straightforward language, Yeager argues that economists should be alert to their ethical positions, rather than preach tacitly behind the mask of social welfare analysis and the like. Calling for a comparative institutional analysis, Yeager himself advances an argument in favor of an indirect or rule utilitarianism, one that is sure to unleash debate among libertarians, classical liberals, and defenders of mainstream welfare economics, and among moral philosophers who follow the present state of economic theory. David L. Prychitko, Northern Michigan University, US With this important book, esteemed economist Leland B. Yeager grounds moral and political philosophy in the requirements of a well-functioning society, one whose members reap the gains from peaceful cooperation while pursuing their own diverse goals. This book explores the reasons an individual may have for helping to uphold such a society rather than seeking a free ride on the moral behavior of others. A work in the tradition of Hume, Smith, Mill, von Mises, Hayek and Hazlitt, it expounds a rules or indirect version of utilitarianism. It reviews criticisms of utilitarianism in detail, as well as alternative grounds of ethics including contractarianism, rights-based doctrines, and appeals to specific intuitions. Yeager brings the insights of economics to bear on a field usually dominated by philosophers and theologians. Ethics comes across as a subject amply open to the findings of economics and the other social and natural sciences. Economists, philosophers and other students and scholars of the social sciences will welcome this book. It will also appeal to any reader interested in exploring the ideas of ethics.
Download or read book Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy written by Daniel M. Hausman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-28 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses how standard economics may be improved by an understanding of moral philosophy.
Download or read book What Money Can t Buy written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
Download or read book Are Economists Basically Immoral written by Paul T. Heyne and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Art Economists Basically Immoral?" and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion is a collection of Heyne's essays focused on an issue that preoccupied him throughout his life and which concerns many free-market skeptics - namely, how to reconcile the apparent selfishness of a free-market economy with ethical behavior." "Written with the nonexpert in mind, and in a highly engaging style, these essays will interest students of economics, professional economists with an interest in ethical and theological topics, and Christians who seek to explore economic issues."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Reckoning with Markets written by James Halteman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undergraduate economics students begin and end their study of economics with the simple claim that economics is value free. Only in a policy role will values and beliefs enter into economic work; there can be little meaningful dialogue by economists about such personal views and opinions. This view, now well over 200 years old, has been challenged by heterodox thinkers in economics, and philosophers and social scientists outside the discipline all along the way. However, much of the debate in modern times has been narrowly focused on philosophical methodological issues on one hand or theological/sectarian concerns on the other. None of this filters down to the typical undergraduate even in advanced courses on the history of economic thought. This book presents the notion that economic thinking cannot escape value judgments at any level and that this understanding has been the dominant view throughout most of history. It shows how, from ancient times, people who thought about economic matters integrated moral reflection into their thinking. Reflecting on the Enlightenment and the birth of economics as a science, Halteman and Noell illustrate the process by which values and beliefs were excluded from economics proper. They also appraise the reader with relevant developments over the last half-century which offer promise of re-integrating moral reflection in economic research. With the advent of interdependency concepts and game theory, behavioral economics and the infusion of other social sciences, especially psychology, into economic considerations, the door is once again open to moral reflection. It is a sensitive subject that can be divisive for many and there is little if any assessable literature on the topic at the undergraduate level. One way to approach the subject is to follow the path of the great thinkers of the past and observe how they worked through economic issues from a set of values that was foundational to their thinking. This places moral thinking in a context illuminating the complexity and importance of moral reflection and illustrating its impact on the culture of the times. Reckoning with Markets follows this method with a deliberate effort to cast the material in terms that will engage the undergraduate student. A number of vignettes which apply the perspectives of key figures in the history of economic thought to modern values and policy questions are provided.
Download or read book The Theory of Moral Sentiments written by Adam Smith and published by . This book was released on 1761 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Human Goods Economic Evils written by Edward Hadas and published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute. This book was released on 2007 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of modern economic theory is based on a rather unflattering view of human nature, one that is essentially selfish and materialistic. Not surprisingly, this incomplete version of human anthropology makes for some rather incomplete economic theory, argues Edward Hadas in Human Goods & Economic Evils. Instead of simply being utility maximizers, Hadas argues human beings also seek to maximize morality in their everyday economic lives. For Hadas, economic man is moral man, who always strives for the good according to his nature. While the weakness of human nature ensures that the good is never fully achieved, economic activity is nevertheless best understood as part of the great moral enterprise of humanity. Human Goods & Economic Evils does not claim that the basic economic activities of laboring and consuming are the most important things in life, but they are literally vital, and as such deserve to be studied and understood through a more morally sympathetic view of human nature. With this in mind, Human Goods & Economic Evils provides both lay readers and policymakers the intellectual tools necessary to judge what is right and what is wrong about the modern economy, and returns the study of economics to its proper, more humanistic sphere.
