Economics Is a Moral Science: A Value Based Approach

Abstract

Keynes prophesies economics as a moral science. Economists would abandon instrumentalist orientation where means get all our attention and the ends virtually none, and focus on what is the good life and the good society. The paper advances to that end the value based approach. It focuses on two interventions that seem to be necessary to realize economics as a moral science. One is to redefine economics and the second is to expand the economic understanding of goods. Defining economics as the discipline that studies the realization of values is the first step to perceive economics as a moral science. The next step is the inclusion of shared goods as an economic category. The result is a broader scope of economics, one that allows us to consider the goods and values that are of ultimate importance to people, groups, organizations and societies. The notion of shared good, combined with the notion “willingness to contribute” furthermore addresses the problem that standard economics has with altruistic behavior. The paper argues that most of our actions are not directed at private gain, or the acquisition of private goods, but at the realization of shared goods.

I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor those who teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.John Maynard Keynes . Essays in Persuasion, p 161