Reconnecting Economics with Moral Sciences

|Peter Boettke|

INET and Michael Sandel will be starting a new video series on what money can and cannot buy, and in the process reconnect economics with moral philosophy.

 There is much to learn from his musings. But I believe he also has some serious blind spots.  Since I began my career focused on the history of ideas on socialism, and history of practice of socialism, these issues of what was science, and what was normative theorizing was critical to my enterprise.  See, e.g., this paper published with a certain sense of irony in Faith & Economics. But my own thinking on this can be seen in a series of essays throughout my career -- hopefully reflecting both coherence and growth -- can be found here, here and here.  Kaitlyn Woltz and I have recently contributed a paper to Mark White's Oxford Handbook on Economics & Ethics as well that should be published in the next year.  

Yes, Virginia, Economics is a Science, but Political Economy is an Art.  And the worldly philosophy is best practiced when we remember this, and practice our craft in the tradition of Adam Smith to John Stewart Mill.  Someday I am going to write a book dealing with the fate of moral philosophers in the age of economic scientism.

Comments

[Steve Fritzinger]

I read What Money Can't Buy to review it for the BBC. I was unimpressed.

One of Sandel's first examples of a morally objectionable policy was China's One Child Policy. But he wasn't concerned about a brutal infringement of natural human rights. He was worried that rich Chinese treated the monetary penalty imposed for violating the policy as a fee, not a fine.

That's like saying the problem with the Nazis was that they put too much nutmeg in their bratwurst.

The other examples that stood out were powerful people paying poor people to stand in line for Congressional hearings for them and cities selling naming rights to stadiums. He never asked why powerful people think it's worth their money to pay to jump the line at hearings or why governments are selling rights to things they never should have built in the first place.

[christopher kates]

good one