What mainstream economics should learn from the ethics of care

Abstract

In the long history of philosophical ethics, the emergence of an ethics of care is a recent phenomenon. At its root lies a conception of human behavior that diverges from those prevailing in mainstream economics. Our goal is to highlight that the conception of the person in the ethics of care is very different from that in mainstream economics, but at the same time it opens a promising avenue for future research in this latter scientific discipline. Our investigation is therefore exclusively ontological, insofar as we wonder to what extent the moral philosophy of care can prove to be a source of inspiration for modern academic economics. More specifically, we show that the conception of the person in the ethics of care could significantly improve the understanding of human behavior in economics.