Abstract
Pretty much the first thing that undergraduates are taught about economics is that it is a “positive” subject.1 In other words, subject to some foundational assumptions about individual economic motivation, it provides a non-normative technical toolkit for understanding how key economic measures such as prices and quantities arise and the relationships between those. One highly popular undergraduate textbook, audaciously entitled An Introduction to Positive Economics, has not been out of print since first publication almost half a century ago.2 Economics is in essence a modernist subject, a product of the Enlightenment project to free the individual from higher moral authority or external teleology. It retains very firmly a distinct meta-narrative, derived from the notion of homo oeconomicus, the rational economic individual.
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Notes
Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” Essays in Positive Economics, ed. Milton Friedman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 3–43.
Richard G. Lipsey, An Introduction to Positive Economics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963).
Andrew Hartropp, What Is Economic Justice? (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2007).
Roger Crisp, How Should One Live: Essays on the Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Bloomsbury, 1981, 3rd Ed., 2007), 54–55.
Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans and Leicester: Apollos, 1994).
Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006).
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1890).
See, for example, Gary S. Becker, “Nobel Lecture: The Economic Way of Looking at Behaviour,” Journal of Political Economy, 101, no. 3 (1993) 385–409;
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).
Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, 2nd Ed. (Harmond-sworth: Penguin, 2011).
Tom Wright, Virtue Reborn (London: SPCK, 2010).
Graham Cray, Disciples and Citizens: A Vision for Distinctive Living (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2007).
J. David Richardson, “Frontiers in Economics and Christian Scholarship,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 17 (June 1988): 381–400.
Tis is perhaps most notably espoused in the work of John Rawls, for example “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985): 223–251.
As an example, see Robert H. Frank, Tomas D. Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan, “Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7 (1993): 159–171. However, others dispute this criticism.
George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84, no. 3 (1970): 488–500.
For a Christian economist’s perspective, see Philip E. Davis, The Crisis and the Kingdom: Economics, Scripture and the Global Financial Crisis, (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012).
Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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© 2015 Jeremy Kidwell and Sean Doherty
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Henley, A. (2015). Economics and Virtue Ethics: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. In: Kidwell, J., Doherty, S. (eds) Theology and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536518_8
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