Abstract
The paper warns that a significant body of philosophical work in virtue ethics is associated with a critique of the market economy and economics. The market depends on instrumental rationality and extrinsic motivation ; market interactions therefore fail to respect the internal value of human practices and the intrinsic motivations of human actors. By using market exchange as a central model, mainstream economics normalizes extrinsic motivation, not only in markets but also in social life more generally; therefore economics appears as an assault on virtues and on human flourishing .
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Notes
- 1.
A certain philosophy of otherness, from Emmanuel Lévinas to Roberto Esposito, feels that it must overcome this Thou/alter-ego in an external “he/she” that makes relationality open and transcendent: “All the rhetoric of the excess of the other notwithstanding, in a one-on-one comparison, the other is conceivable only and ever in relation to the ‘I’. The other cannot be but non-self, its reverse and its shadow” (Esposito 2009: 129).
- 2.
In Bruni (2006) there is a reconstructed this historical evolution that led to the rise of modern individualist economics; see this work for further study.
- 3.
There would be much to say regarding the Protestant culture in which both Hobbes and Smith worked; the rejection of mediators in fact created other mediators that, in the long run, are emerging as tyrants no less fierce than those of pre-modern times.
- 4.
Roberto Esposito in fact points out that the most radical contradiction is not the one between community and society (as in classic social thought) but between communitas and immunitas.
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Bruni, L. (2017). Economics and Vulnerability: Relationships, Incentives, Meritocracy. In: Rona, P., Zsolnai, L. (eds) Economics as a Moral Science. Virtues and Economics, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53291-2_9
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