Is Economics a Moral Science?

Abstract

Economics is a multifaceted inquiry into the social relationship among humans in society. This mutifacetedness creates a lack of communication between critics of economics (which includes a large proportion of philosophers and professors with a religious bent) and defenders of what, for lack of a better term, I will call mainstream economics. The problem is that when critics attack economics, their attack generally focuses on the one-dimensional vision of the social relationship of individuals that is conveyed by the principal texts rather than on a much more sophisticated vision of humans and of social relationships held by good economists. The author fully agrees that morals and science are intertwined in a Putnam sense—the questions one asks and the framework one chooses reflects moral choices. But the paper argues that that as a pragmatic way to move forward, that deeper intertwinement can be usefully separated from less deep, entanglements that are more easily understood and recognized.