Abstract
The preceding quotation from G. L. S. Shackle well articulates one of the most severe sources of confusion besetting methodologists in their attempt to resolve questions concerning the normative/descriptive status of economic theory, especially the theory of choice (CCT). On the one hand, constituting the prevailing “orthodoxy” among economic methodologists are those economists and philosophers of science who once again have endorsed principles of scientific method urged by logical positivists, a cardinal tenet of whom has been has been that of the “unity of method” between the natural and social sciences.2 Hence, in conformity to what are taken to be “mechanistic models” of the natural sciences, it is argued that economic events such as consumer choices are explained by invoking causes comprised of “antecedent conditions” or events logically “external” and temporally prior to these events (effects). Or, more precisely, economic events are explained by deducing such items of behaviour from “ordinary” causal laws representing uniformities in such mechanistic sequences. In particular, thus, a mechanistic model of explanation would avoid any mention of the family of intentional entities consisting of the reasons, motives, goals, purposes, social conventions, moral principles, etc. for the sake of which, or in compliance with, the economic agent might be claimed to undertake his activity. As Jevons succinctly put this viewpoint in the last century, economic theory in general is to be conceived as a “mechanics of utility and self-interest.”3
Yet still in an explosively changing world, we have a fragmented economics... One reason for this goes deep. It is the lack of a philosophical basis for economic theory. Economic life is looked upon as deliberative action, and again it is looked upon as action determined by the combination of tastes and circumstances. Which is it? Can it be both? Nobody asks, and such problems being unrecognized, the diversity of hidden assumptions creates a babel of conflicting languages.1
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References
G. L. S. Shackle, A Scheme of Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. ix.
The locus classicus is M. Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics”. For a “textbook” explication of such methodological unity, see R. G. Lipsey, An Introduction to Positive Economics,4th edn., (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1975), Part I, pp. 3–59.
W. W. Jevons, Theory of Political Economy, 4th edn. (London: Macmillan, 1924 [1st edn. 18711 p. 21.
Some representatives of this view are A. R. Louch, Explantion and Human Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966 )
P. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958 )
W. H. Dray, Laws and Explanation in History ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957 )
R. S. Peters, The Concept of Motivation, 2nd edn. ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960 )
G. H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding ( Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971 ).
D. Braybrooke, Philosophy of Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987) Chap. 3.
See W. S. Jevons, Theory of Political Economy,4th edn. (London: Macmillan, 1924 [1st ed. 1871])
F. Y. Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics (1881), (reprint, London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1932 ).
J. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, p. 11. For recent discussions of the link between utilitarianism and economic theory see J. A. Mirrlees, “The economic uses of utilitarianism”, and Frank Hahn, “On some difficulties of the utilitarian economist”, and A. Sen and B. Williams, “Introduction” in A. Sen and B. Williams (eds.), Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 63–84; pp. 187–98; pp. 1–21.
In this regard, see the illuminating historical studies of Philip Mirowski in his More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
A. G. Pikler, “Utility Theories in Field Physics and Mathematical Economics”, I and II, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 5, 1954 and 1955, pp. 47–58; 303–18.
For the general claim that contemporary economics conceives human behaviour in mechanistic terms see N. Georgescu-Roegen, “The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem” in H. E. Daly (ed.), Economics, Ecology, Ethics: Essays Towards a Steady-State Economy (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980), pp. 4959, and his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), esp. the “Introduction” and Chap. 2, sec. 1. See also
P. Mirowski, Against Mechanism: Protecting Economics From Science ( Totawa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1988 )
F. H. Knight, On the History and Method of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), Chap. VIII, pp. 179–201.
C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1930 ), pp. 189–90.
C. Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964 ), p. 220.
B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behaviour ( New York: Macmillan, 1953 ), p. 87.
For general criticism by an economist of a lack of sufficient scope in neo-classical theory for an adequate inclusion of the varieties of empirical motivations for choice, especially those which incorporate moral motivation, see the following by A. K. Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory”, sec. VII; “Choice, Orderings, and Morality”; “Utilitarianism and Welfarism”, Journal of Philosophy,Vol. 76, 1979, pp. 463–89, and On Ethics and Economics,Chap. 7.
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Hodgson, B. (2001). Teleology and Utilitarian Economics. In: Economics as Moral Science. Studies in Economic Ethics and Philosophy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04476-6_6
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