In the following pages we discuss three historical cases of moral economies in science: Drosophila genetics, late twentieth century American astronomy, and collaborations between American drug companies and medical scientists in the interwar years. An examination of the most striking differences and similarities between these examples, and the conflicts internal to them, reveals constitutive features of moral economies, and the ways in which they are formed, negotiated, and altered. We critically evaluate these three examples through the filters (...) of rational choice, utility, and American pragmatism, using the latter to support the conclusion that there is no single vision of moral economies in science and no single theory—moral, political, social—that will explain them. These filters may not be the only means through which to evaluate the moral economies examined, but aspects of each appear prominent in all three cases. In addition, explanations for decisions are often given in the language of these theories, both at the macro (policy) level and at the local level of the moral economies we discuss. In light of such factors, the use of these frameworks seems justified. We begin with an attempt to define the nature of moral economies, then move to a consideration of scientific communities as moral communities operating within material and other constraints which we relate to wider questions of political economy and societal accountabilities. (shrink)

‘Moral economy’ has become a popular concept in empirical research in disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology and political science. This research utilizes normative concepts and has obvious normative implications and relevance. However, there has been little to no dialogue between this research and philosophers working on normative ethics. The present article seeks to remedy this situation by highlighting fertile points of dialogue between descriptive and normative ethicists. The proposition is that empirical researchers can become more precise (...) and stringent in their descriptions of moral attitudes and traditions with a greater understanding of normative ethics; and, at the same time, philosophers have much to gain from a closer examination of the realities of moral thinking and social action. The concurrent examination of both strands of research may be especially rewarding. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview Andrew Sayer discusses how he became a realist and then the development of his work over the subsequent decades. He comments on his postdisciplinary approach, his early work on economy and its influences, how he came to write Method in Social Science and the transition in Realism and Social Science to normative critical social science and moral economy. The interview concludes with discussion of his three most recent books and the (...) themes that connect them, not least the ongoing problem of a ‘diabolical double crisis’ of capitalism: extreme inequality and climate change. (shrink)

The article expounds the ordo-liberal tradition that emerged as a distinct neo-liberal conceptualization of free economy as a political practice. According to this tradition there are things more important than GDP in as much as free economy depends on the formation of the moral and the social preconditions of market freedom. The social facilitation and moral embedding of free economy are fundamental to the ordo-liberal conception of a human economy, which entails a social policy (...) of Vitalpolitik – a politics of life. Particularly at a time of manifest economic crisis and austerity, the social and moral veracity of economic liberty depends thus on the exercise of strong state authority. (shrink)

The relationship between Adam Smith's official methodology and his own actual theoretical practice as a social scientist may be grasped only against the background of the Humean project of Moral Newtonianism. The main features in Smith's methodology are (i) the provisional character of explanatory principles, (ii) 'internal' criteria of truth, (iii) the acknowledgement of an imaginative aspect in principles, with the related problem of the relationship between internal truth and external truth understood as mirroring 'real' causes. Smith's Newtonian (as (...) opposed to Cartesian) methodology makes room for progress in social theorizing as it allows for a decentralization of the various fields of Moral Science, contributing to the shaping of political economy. On the other hand, the Cartesian legacy in Smith's Newtonian methodology makes the relationship problematic between phenomena and principles. (shrink)

Introduction: conversing with traditions : ancients and moderns in nineteenth-century practical science -- Aristotle on the constitution of social justice and classical democracy -- Aristotle and classical social theory : social justice and moral economy in Marx, Weber, and Durkheim -- Kant on the critique of reason and science -- Kant and classical social theory : epistemology, logic, and methods in Marx, Weber, and Durkheim -- Conclusion: dreams of classical reason : historical science between existentialism (...) and antiquity. (shrink)

Is moral philosophy more foundational than political philosophy? In other words, is "how to live?" more fundamental than "how to live together?" We were trained to say yes, but there was never any reason to believe it. Must rigorous reflection on how to live aim to derive necessary truths from timeless axioms, ignoring ephemeral contingencies of time and place? In the 1800s, philosophy left the contingencies to emerging departments of social science. Where did that leave philosophy? Did cutting (...) ties to empirical reality checks leave philosophers with deeper questions? Better answers? Here too, our practices suggest that we assume the answer is yes, but the truth appears to be no. To recover a measure of relevance to questions that truly need answers, theorizing about how to live together might take its cue from philosophy's current renewing of ties with political economy. We can ask which principles have a history of demonstrably being organizing principles of actual thriving communities at their best. (shrink)

Andrew Sayer and Dave Elder-Vass are both advocates of ‘moral economy’. To this end, Elder-Vass offers a theory of appropriative practices that enables us to evaluate the enormous variety of forms...

Dominique Vermersch | : En vouant sa prétention à la scientificité dans l’affermissement de l’autonomie morale des individus, la science économique contrecarre d’emblée non seulement la primauté mais la réalité même du bien commun. Ce faisant, elle se voit contrainte à suggérer des éthiques de substitution dont les écueils en viennent a contrario à démontrer la prégnance du bien commun ; et plus encore sa nécessité, rappelée impérieusement par la réalité même des faits économiques. S’illustre ainsi le constat sans (...) concession de Jean-Pierre Dupuy, suivant lequel l’économie rationalise lourdement et retrouve ce que la morale a toujours su. | : By dedicating its pretention to scientificity to the strengthening of the moral autonomy of individuals, economic science thwarts at once not only the primacy but the very reality of the common good. Doing so, it finds itself constrained to suggest ethics of substitution whose pitfalls turn out to demonstrate a contrario the pregnancy of the common good ; and even more so its necessity, imperiously brought back by the reality of economic facts. Thus it illustrates the uncompromising observation made by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, according to which economics rationalizes heavily only to rediscover what morals have always known. (shrink)

What I have tried to do here is to provide a historical example of the interdependence between nature and culture that is one of the themes of this conference. To sum up: Scientific descriptions of the world emerge out of a complex interaction between nature, economic production, and the legal system. “Science” consists of a struggle among scientists, and between scientists and citizens, over what counts as “reality.” Lawmaking, in turn, consists of a struggle between people who want to (...) allocate access to resources for particular purposes, whether for commercial use, recreational use, or “natural” uses. Production, for its part, is a complicated function of technology, the sociology of user groups, the structure of legal entitlements to access, and the availability of resources. Nature, finally, is at any point, to no small degree, the product of past and present human impacts on it — which impacts, in turn, are determined in no small way by the sociology and the legal structure of the market.Each process takes place in continual conversation with all the others. As John Muir put it, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”45 Historically, resource managers have gotten into trouble when they have unconsciously assumed that such is not the case — yet such, assumptions are powerful because they are made instinctively, unthinkingly, at the level of people's basic understanding of the world and their place in it. Lots of them persist.On the other hand, in a few experimental cases in the United States and Canada where government and users have shared power and responsibility for resources management, including long-range planning for recovery and enhancement, here have been some notable improvements. The strategy goes under the name of “co-management” and involves negotiated agreements for shared decision-making between central authority and local groups. Typically, both government and industry resist such arrangements because they involve restructuring the power relations between different sectors in the industry; the result is that the few experiments in co-management that we have seen in the United States have come in areas, typically fisheries and wildlife, where the resource is in serious crisis and all of the parties to the agreement have had to abandon the positions they held previously.Examples of successful co-management regimes include those among American tribes in the Pacific Northwest, among commercial salmon fishers in Alaska, and in a project to rehabilitate the clam industry in New Jersey. Government employees and local groups share responsibility for gathering scientific data about the resources, for developing plans to manage them, and for enforcing regulations. Successful experiments at co-management seem to generate better scientific data about their resources than traditional management regimes do; they significantly reduce enforcement costs; and they enhance the economic power of the resource users. Most importantly, they nurture among the user groups a sense of control over their own destinies, and a willingness to share both costs and benefits of managing the resources rationally and to develop lasting, stable mechanisms for conflict resolution. The process is both democratic and ecologically rational. The key is to link the day-to-day work of producers to their long-range interests as residents in their communities and as working parts of the ecological systems in which they live.45At a minimum, it is clear that objective certainty about the state of the resources or the likely effect of whatever regulations we do impose is simply not attainable. This is partly because of the important role that random shocks play in the environment (and should play in our thinking about it), and also because of the sheer complexity of the system in which we are embedded. There will always be something that even the most complete model leaves out; and in any event the total system of ecology, production, and management will change every time something changes in any part of it.The policy lesson to be derived from all of this, finally, is that what we ought to sustain when we approach conservation problems is not the size of a particular resource, or even the prosperity of a particular harvesting group, but the long-term health of the interaction between nature, the economy, and the political system. We can recognize that the balance of the system, our attempted insurance against an uncertain future, democracy among user groups, and our moral duty to avoid extinguishing species — all of these things being difficult to quantify — do play integral roles in the conversation between nature and humankind, and perhaps more significant roles than the more objective measures to which we usually look for guidance. We can recognize, as John Muir did, that because everything in the universe is hitched to everything else, every step we take will change the total system in some way. When we make choices, then, we can keep an eye on what kind of conversation we want to have with the rest of Creation and make our choices accordingly. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402064 00014 *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402064 00015. (shrink)

:Opportunism impacts the behavior of firms in market situations where they purchase goods and services externally and create dependency relationships with other firms. Opportunism as a business issue is addressed in economics and marketing literature as an important factor in transaction cost analysis and market governance. Management and business ethics scholars, however, do not address this issue in depth, if at all.The recent bankruptcy of MCI WorldCom highlights some of the risks inherent in a world economy where customers and (...) companies of one society are dependent upon the business practices of partner companies in other societies. Telecommunications customers and companies in Asia, Europe and other places, who depended upon MCI WorldCom for connections to North America, now have important areas of their business in jeopardy because of the uncertainty about the fate of a critical business partner.MCI WorldCom’s situation appears to be the result of an attempt to obtain personal gain, at the expense of others, by at least one senior manager. This is called opportunism. Williamson defined opportunism as “self-interest seeking with guile.” It can wreak havoc with companies, customers, stock markets and economies and is demonstrated regularly in press accounts of misstatements on financial reports and other ways senior managers use their positions to enhance their personal wealth and influence.This paper will focus on the ethical issues surrounding business relationships and how Confucianism, with its focus on trust, reciprocity and mutual benefit in relationships, can offer a moral foundation to the inter-firm arrangements that are so much a part of the contemporary business landscape. (shrink)

How Compassion can Transform our Politics, Economy, and Society draws together experts across disciplines - ranging from psychology to climate science, philosophy to economics, history to business - to explore the power of compassion to transform politics, our society, and our economy. The book shows that compassion can be used as the basis of a new political, economic, and social philosophy as well as a practical tool to address climate breakdown, inequality, homelessness, and more. Crucially, it also (...) provides a detailed plan for its execution. It marks the first time that the study of compassion has been applied across multiple disciplines. The book provides a template for the study of compassion on an interdisciplinary basis and will appeal to academics, professionals and the general reader searching for a fresh and inspiring approach to the seemingly intractable problems facing the world. (shrink)

This article challenges E.P. Thompson's definition of ‘moral economy’ as a traditional consensus of crowd rights that were swept away by market forces. Instead, it suggests that the concept has the potential of improving the understanding of modern civil society. Moral economy was a term invented in the eighteenth century to describe many things. Thompson's approach reflects only a minor part of this conceptual history. His understanding of moral economy is conditioned by a dichotomous (...) view of history and by the acceptance of a model according to which modern economy is not subject to moral concerns. It is on principle problematic to confine a term conjoining two concepts as general as ‘moral’ and ‘economy’ to a specific historical and social setting. Recent approaches that frame moral economy as an emotively defined order of morals are also misleading since they do not address economic issues in the way they are commonly understood. The most promising current approaches appear to be those that consider t.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article we call for a paradigm change in relation to the way we tend to look at how markets and morals are entwined in the writings of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). We argue that it would be wrong to apply contemporary notions of economics retrospectively and somewhat a-historically to a thinker of an axial time in which economics as a separate sphere did not exist, and morals and markets and the way they relate to each other were about (...) to be reconceptualised. We argue that it is thus no accident that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith took to Swift. They admired more than the expressive or rhetorical skills in Swift; in the first instance, they read Swift as somebody who managed to express moral sentiments (and even outrage) in an appealing, that is mostly satirical way, thereby not only criticizing the cruel conditions in Ireland at the time but also identifying the gap between rhetoric and reality and thus taking issue with the hypocrisy and double standards of the time. We will use two famous examples of Swift's work to illustrate our case, A Modest Proposal (1729) and Directions to Servants (1745). (shrink)

Should the idea of economic man-the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus-determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding "no." Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may "crowd out" ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks (...) the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to illuminate today’s economic science with the light of Aristotle’s philosophy of economics. The author first describes Aristotle’s thoughts about the economy. Then, he distinguishes and discusses three Aristotelian principles: (a) economics should be a classical practical or moral science, (b) economics should not look for an unlimited wealth, but for the wealth necessary for the good life, and (c) economics should be aimed at the common good.

Genetics today have occupied among sciences the privileged role of physics and chemistry of the beginning of this century. This explosive scientific field influences crucially various disciplines, among them life sciences and informatics. Moreover, it imposes “de facto” dramatic changes to our individual and collective life style, thus influencing the whole framework of our civilisation. The intensive involvement of the global economy in the progress of the research and the dissemination of its applications, arises ethical issues to be arranged.The (...) danger of reappearance of Eugenic ideologies and practices does threaten the contemporary society. Anthropology has to contribute more intensively in the cultivation of a humanistic and moral nurture, necessary for the new framework of principles, efficient for the technological society of the 21st century. (shrink)

It is a violation of legitimate academic freedom to attempt to link Catholicism to a particular school of economic thought and shut down all further debate. Whether the realm of human choice, which economics describes, is subject to an array of cause-and-effect relationships is obviously a matter for human reason to determine. From there, reason can then investigate these relationships. Although economic policy has a moral dimension, economics as a positive scienceconsists merely of an edifice of cause-and-effect relationships, and (...) to that extent is as autonomous as the purely descriptive sides of all other sciences. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ‘gift of aid’ and its impact upon the local moral economy in a Sri Lankan village affected by the tsunami disaster in 2004. The importance of giving, receiving, and reciprocating for the shaping and consolidation of social relations has long been recognized. The act of giving reflects one of the most basic principles of morality and has constituted a classical anthropological field of inquiry. The impact that humanitarian aid had on the local (...) class='Hi'>moral economy of a community struck by disaster and the various ways the ‘gift of aid’ was understood and valued by donors, brokers, and recipients is explored. Also examined is how processes of change were set in motion, benefiting some people and relationships but marginalizing others. Local lifeworlds were shattered in multiple ways and became caught in tensions between competing moral discourses concerning modernity, the collective, and the global. Promoting material recovery disaster aid also generated disorder and fragmentation of lo.. (shrink)

:International business norms do not exist. Content and development of such norms is a significant research question for business ethics scholarship. Any norms must address difficult practical and moral problems facing multinational enterprises. The author’s thesis is as follows. A key circumstance is that international relations remain a Hobbesian state of nature. The theoretical solution of a global sovereignty for norm formulation and enforcement is unlikely. The business ethics literature proposes other insightful but theoretical and conflicting solutions to abstract (...) wealth-responsibility and universalism-relativism controversies. Theoretical convergence seems unlikely. Evolution of multiple international policy regimes fragmented by policy arena is more probable. Regimes will typically be neither morals by agreement nor a morality of the marketplace. Regime development can occur in various other ways. Moral leadership, by firms, stakeholders, nongovernmental organizations or governments, can be a vital force. Formal ethical theories can inform and guide such leadership initiatives. This process perspective is applied to several recent case examples cited here as supporting evidence: anti-corruption, labor, environmental, human rights, and fiduciary responsibility initiatives. (shrink)

This paper examines the Confucian concept of tian, conventionally translated into English as “Heaven.‘ The secondary literature on tian has primarily focused on the question of what tian is: e.g., whether tian is an anthropomorphic deity or a naturalistic force, or whether tian is transcendent or immanent. Instead, this paper locates tian with respect to the ethical life of human beings, and argues that the two conflicting concepts of “moral economy‘ and “contingency‘ are main characteristics of tian. This (...) paper further investigates these characteristics in Kongzi’s and Mengzi’s ethical thought: how they conceptualized moral economy and contingency, and how their different conceptualizations shaped their respective ethical programs: Kongzi’s ethics of faith and Mengzi’s ethics of confidence. (shrink)

This article criticises the political-economic analysis of settler colonial studies, which it draws out through an immanent critique of its most famous practitioners. It then offers a critical genealogy of the wider theoretical trend that secures it: the post-Cold War vogue of asserting the ever-increasing centrality of primitive accumulation in global capitalism – what we might term a mode of predation. Finally, it teases out the tensions and confusions in the reliance of settler colonial studies upon Marx’s concept of surplus (...) populations, as well as problems abounding in Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’. Overall, it argues that the frequent claim that we inhabit a global settler modernity cannot be sustained through these notions, and that this claim is profoundly moral and academic, lacking political and analytical value. The insistence on the durability of settler colonialism amounts, in this literature, to a claim on behalf of settler colonial studies itself. (shrink)

The paper offers a wide-angle view of ethics and welfare through the lens of ‘moral economy’. It examines economic activities in relation to a view of welfare as well-being, and to ethics in terms of economic justice. Rather than draw upon abstract ideal theories such as Rawlsian or Capabilities approaches, it calls for an evaluation of actually existing sources of harm and benefit in neoliberal capitalism. It argues that we need to look behind economic outcomes in terms of (...) how much money different people have, examine their economic relations to others, and evaluate the justifications of these relations and their associated rights and practices. It distinguishes three sources of income – earned income, transfers, and unearned income, and argues that the last of these has no functional or ethical justification but has major implications for welfare. It then comments on the policy implications of the argument, including brief comments on asset-based welfare and universal basic income policies, and concludes. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Alysworth & Castro, 2021; Castro & Pham, 2020; Williams, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but self- (...) control, and addiction as well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth & Castro, 2021; Bhargava & Velasquez, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, 2018; Aylsworth & Castro, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, 2018). -/- Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency. (shrink)

Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes — and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this ‘causal selection problem’ in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled (...) solution to it. After sketching that solution, it is applied to a few biological examples, including to a debate concerning the ‘causal democracy’ of organismal development, with an anti-democratic (though not a gene-centric) moral. (shrink)

Taking credit for digitalization and platformization, China has initiated its open science infrastructure implementation and made an effort to focus on open access (OA) journals and data sharing over the past two decades. With the continuous development need, issues and concerns have caught in attention, including data accessibility, research transparency, general population awareness and communication of science, public trust in science, and scientific research and innovation efficiency. This paper has unfolded the maze of open science stance (...) in China and elaborated on its current economy, openness and freedom extents, and future innovation potential towards a global open science community, within depth and scope of both the Chinese and Western scholars’ interpretations. (shrink)

With the increasing focus on globalization of the economy, ethical issues are often submerged by the goal of increasing profitability. This article explores the implications of globalization and its effects on both the Earth’s poor and the Earth itself. It illustrates how poverty goes hand in hand with environmental degradation. The economic and moral impacts of international financial and regulatory organizations are analyzed and discussed. The article demonstrates how the economically marginalized suffer not only from the obvious lack (...) of food, clothing, and shelter but also from polluted air, an unpotable water supply, and macro issues such as global warming. It concludes with the recommendation of looking to the economy of the Beatitudes of the New Testament for solutions. (shrink)

At the heart of Heike Endter's 2009 dissertation, published in 2011 as Ökonomische Utopien und ihre Bilder in Science-Fiction-Filmen, lies the assumption that art history, as a field and with its unique methodology, can provide an insight into film studies that has not yet been discovered and made accessible. Interestingly, Endter seeks to argue this unique insight as a benefit of art history, a discipline threatened by neoliberal ideals of employability, by analyzing a field of interconnected terms that directly (...) address this threat: "utopias, the economy, the visual and science fiction film". She is driven by the idea of a "use value," both morally and economically... (shrink)

In Bettering Humanomics: A New and Old Approach to Economic Science, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey offers a critique of contemporary economics and a proposal for a better humanomics. McCloskey argues for an economic science that accepts the models and mathematics, the statistics and experiments of the current orthodoxy, but also attests to the immense amount we can still learn about human nature and the economy. From observing human actions in social contexts, to the various understandings attained by studying (...) history, philosophy, and literature, McCloskey presents the myriad ways in which we think about life and how we justify and understand our actions in a synergistically human approach towards economic theory and practice. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it aims to delineate the flow of resources and the claims on those resources within the humanitarian aid system by locating task structures and functional units across the aid chain. Second, it draws on this account to highlight tensions in the system. Different stations in the organisational process are conditioned by the tasks assigned to them, how those tasks are anchored in a moral economy, and their historical interrelations. Third, it (...) explores how aid organisations are perceived by experts in different parts of the aid chain. Four key agents were invited to recount their work experiences. We then consider how the outlook of the interviewees was shaped by their place in the aid chain. The interviews are an inventory of experiences, a preliminary corroboration of the organisational analysis that preceded them, and a source of future hypotheses. (shrink)