Many worry that global warming may produce dire consequences not just for humankind, but for many other living organisms on the planetEarth. This has raised concerns about the desirability of the political and economic policies that brought us to this point in history, a period of markedly higher levels of consumptionConsumption that produce higher levels of CO2. That, in turn, has raised new concerns about the ideologies and theoretical paradigms upon which such political and economic policies are based. Many now (...) call for a rejection of free marketFree Market economies to make room for more centrally planned economic systems. Even the idea of Homo EconomicusHomo Economicus – the primary actor in the modern free marketFree Market economy – is under fire in favor of a new conceptualization of the primary actor: Homo CuratorHomo Curator. This essay explains why these changes are both unnecessary and dangerous. I argue they are unnecessary by showing: (1) Homo Economicus and excessive consumptionConsumption are not the root of the problem, and (2) how the theory of market failure already gives us proven means to address problems like global warming. I argue that abandoning Homo Economicus and the free marketFree Market economy is dangerous because it will inevitably lead to a world that is far less likely to support individual and collective human flourishing; one that poorer, less free, and less respectful of the sanctity of the individual. (shrink)

A new variational method, the principle of least radix economy, is formulated. The mathematical and physical relevance of the radix economy, also called digit capacity, is established, showing how physical laws can be derived from this concept in a unified way. The principle reinterprets and generalizes the principle of least action yielding two classes of physical solutions: least action paths and quantum wavefunctions. A new physical foundation of the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics is then accomplished and it is used (...) to derive the Schrödinger and Dirac equations and the breaking of the commutativity of spacetime geometry. The formulation provides an explanation of how determinism and random statistical behavior coexist in spacetime and a framework is developed that allows dynamical processes to be formulated in terms of chains of digits. These methods lead to a new foundation for Lorentz transformations and special relativity. The Parker-Rhodes combinatorial hierarchy is encompassed within our approach and this leads to an estimate of the interaction strength of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces that agrees with the experimental values to an error of less than one thousandth. Finally, it is shown how the principle of least-radix economy naturally gives rise to Boltzmann’s principle of classical statistical thermodynamics. A new expression for a general nonequilibrium entropy is proposed satisfying the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (shrink)

Collaborative economy emerged as a response to the need of people to exchange, produce and share in a more humane and cooperative manner. However, the growth of collaborative economy organizations and the terminological confusion have led to debates about their possible effects, both positive and negative. In this study, we have created a guideline that can be used to evaluate the contribution of organizations considered within collaborative economy to common good. We used the conceptualization of common good, which, from its (...) Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy, was developed by the personalist-humanist perspective of management. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the evaluation of the contribution of any organization to the common good must take into account how the participants develop their virtues, the creation of the community and its impact on the common good of society. At the end of the article, we present the aspects that society must take into account regarding collaborative economy. Firstly, society, in general, must approach collaborative economy as a tool that must complement others in the search for solutions to economic and social problems and, secondly, the governance of the platform-network is essential to foster organizational models that favour the common good. (shrink)

The importance of the collective management of immaterial resources is a key variable in the valorisation of products in a post-industrial economy. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how, in post-industrial economies, it is possible to devise alternative forms of mediation between producers and consumers, such as organic farmers' markets, to curb the appropriation of rent by transnational and/or local business elites from the value created by immaterial resources. More specifically, we analyse those aspects of the collective management (...) of ethical values that, in the case of organic farmers' markets, can be a strategic source of competitive advantage for local producers. In this paper, the Ecomercado de Granada is studied as an example of mediation between production and consumption in a post-industrial economy. (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)

There are three main claims in the paper: first, there is sufficient evidence for affirming that Ricardo adhered to Smith's productivity theory; second, Ricardo's original demonstration of the comparative- advantage proposition is indeed compatible and complementary with respect to the latter; and third, Ricardo agreed with Smith's multifactorial explanation of the pattern of trade, which includes increasing returns and economies of scale. These results suggest that the level of compatibility between the international trade theories of Smith and Ricardo is significantly (...) higher than it is currently reflected in the economic literature. They also add a new perspective to the ongoing process of reassessment of Smith's contributions to international trade theory, further strengthening the view that he was indeed an outstanding international trade theorist. (shrink)

Signs evolve on colective inconsciousness.

This article traces the moral economy of provincial elites who contributed to economic societies that were active in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Northern Europe. Such societies aimed at improving economic conditions in their respective cities, regions, or countries by advocating progressive methods of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. The commitment of members of these societies was not explicitly motivated by economic gains, but by a more complex system of beliefs fueled by the love of their country and the promotion of the (...) common good. The unselfish exploration of new means of production and commercial activity was at the heart of forming a moral economy of trust that guided cooperation within the societies. This moral economy was not subordinate to market rationality, but served as a foundation upon which trust between members was based. Especially in times of crises, as illustrated by the case of Carl Christian Böcker, secretary of the Finnish Economic Society, members could fall.. (shrink)

We trace the meeting and misalignment of competing moral economies in South Wales during the depression of the 1930s. Our case study is the Save the Children Fund's campaign to open emergency open-air nurseries in distressed communities and we analyse the contested meanings of work, voluntarism and cooperation that arose between charitable enterprises and local political organisers in the area. We also inquire into the attempt of a new generation of female political activists to shape a socialist moral economy of (...) the family in South Wales in a period of widening democracy and the growth of class politics and, in doing so, consider the place of gender in defining these social and political values. (shrink)

Economies - and the government institutions that support them - reflect a moral and political choice, a choice we can make and remake. Since the dawn of industrialization and democratization in the late eighteenth century, there has been a succession of political economic frameworks, reflecting changes in technology, knowledge, trade, global connections, political power, and the expansion of citizenship. The challenges of today reveal the need for a new moral political economy that recognizes the politics in political economy. It also (...) requires the redesign of our social, economic, and governing institutions based on assumptions about humans as social beings rather than narrow self-serving individualists. This Element makes some progress toward building a new moral political economy by offering both a theory of change and some principles for institutional design. (shrink)

This article theoretically proposes and empirically verifies an understudied issue in the business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature—how moral degradation in a society influences the relationship between BE or CSR and firm performance. Building on strategic choice theory, we propose that both BE and CSR become more important in enhancing business success when the perceived MD is heightened. Our analysis of 300 firms operating in China statistically confirms our hypotheses: first, under high MD, firms’ engagement in CSR results in (...) higher corporate legitimacy and competitive advantage, and second, their adherence to ethical business codes leads to higher corporate legitimacy. We conclude the article by outlining the implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

Real living wages (RLWs) are an important ethical and moral policy to ensure that employees earn enough to live on. In providing ‘a fair day's pay for a fair day's work’, they set an ethical foundation for liveability. This article explores the ethics and moral economy of the RLW for lower-paid staff in the overlooked economy context of UK professional football, illustrated by a qualitative case study of Luton Town Football Club (LTFC). The article provides theoretical insights grounded in moral (...) economy concepts about how a RLW contributes to a broader common good means of enabling fuller human participation in decent working and living conditions. Applying these concepts using a multi-disciplinary moral economy interpretation offers deeper theoretical contributions than economistic interpretations restricted to mainly technocratic economic distributive issues. LTFC are evidently ethically embedded in a moral economy as a local community club paying a RLW, and part of the overlooked economy. The research also contributes to contemporary debates on ‘Common Good’ HRM regarding the role of living wages in addressing grand common good challenges like inequality and quality of working lives. (shrink)

Digital technologies have made access to and profit from scientific publications hotly contested issues. Debates over open access (OA), however, rarely extend from questions of distribution to questions of how OA is transforming the politics of academic knowledge production. This article argues that the movement towards OA rests on a relatively stable moral episteme that positions different actors involved in the economy of OA (authors, publishers, the general public), and most importantly, knowledge itself. The analysis disentangles the ontological and moral (...) side of these claims, showing how OA changes the meaning of knowledge from a good in the economic, to good in the moral sense. This means OA can be theorized as the moral economy of digital knowledge production. Ultimately, using Boltanski and Thévenot’s work on justification, the article reflects on how this moral economy frames the political subjectivity of actors and institutions involved in academic knowledge production. (shrink)

This article discusses L.-J. Lebret’s methodological and epistemological approach for the elaboration of the concepts of ‘human economy’ and ‘harmonized human development’. Both concepts were very...

We may well be witnessing a decisive event in the history of knowledge as diversity is becoming one of the premier values of late modern societies. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become epistemically consequential. This article examines how two of its varieties, viewpoint diversity and educational diversity, have come (...) to transform the moral economy of science. Both aim at multiplying perspectives on a given subject, but their political subtexts differ markedly. The valorization of educational diversity followed a US Supreme Court decision in 1978 that enabled universities to advance social justice, if they justified race-conscious admissions in terms of the pedagogic benefits of a more diverse student body for all. By contrast, the proponents of viewpoint diversity aim at the reform of scientific knowledge production and distribution rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. We examine the political epistemology of viewpoint diversity by analyzing a controversy between social psychologists who, amid the American culture wars of the 2010s, debated how to rein in their political biases in a scientific field supposedly lacking political diversity. Out of this scientific controversy grew Heterodox Academy, an activist organization promoting viewpoint diversity in higher education. By relating and comparing viewpoint and educational diversity, we clarify what is at stake epistemically in the US-centric moral economy of diversity. (shrink)

The Moral Economies of American Authorship argues that the moral character of authors became a kind of literary property within mid-nineteenth-century America's expanding print marketplace, shaping the construction, promotion, and reception of texts as well as of literary reputations.

This article focuses on one dimension of the interplay of national decline and urban corruption in Rousseau's thought -- what I call Rousseau's analysis of the moral economy of the modern city. It is perhaps fitting that E.P.Thompson has used the concept of 'moral economy' to describe a popular consensus embedded in patterns of deeply rooted assumptions, belief and conduct among the urban poor in eighteenth-century England. Food riots, rooted in a belief in the customary practice of sale of food (...) at fair prices even when production was low, were a response to prices designed to achieve the greatest profit the market allowed. (shrink)

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more (...) virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith, and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy. (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)

What is the purpose of the economy? To answer this intriguing and fundamental question, this book provides a systematic approach to economic ethics and constructs a relationship between the economy and morality; it expounds theoretical and practical issues of economic philosophy along two dimensions: values and institutions. On the dimension of values, Yuichi Shionoya explores the connections between the economy and morality by reconstructing a coherent system of ethics that coordinates the 'good, right, and virtue'. Based on this system of (...) ethics, the book goes on to discuss the dimension of institutions and presents the philosophy of the welfare state, consisting of a tripartite contemporary institution of 'capitalism, democracy, and social security'. Economy and Morality is a remarkable contribution to economic ethics exploring key philosophical issues including efficiency versus justice and liberty versus excellence. Its unique emphasis is the economics of virtue, which is concerned with the virtuous utilization of economic resources for human development, and applied to the reform of the welfare state. will all find this book of great interest - part of its appeal lying in its interdisciplinary approach to contemporary economic, political and social systems based on the synthesis of moral values. (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)

The ethical authority carried in the conventions of fairness and human well-being has been widely adopted under the idea of “moral economy,” forming an eclectic and interdisciplinary debate. Significant, though external to this debate, is a corpus of medieval thought which exhibits a fundamental interest in legitimate market protocols, and the political rights and obligations of agents in relation to the common good of the community. This article asserts the imperative status of a customary basis for understanding not just the (...) analytic version of moral economy but the legacy contained in what might be termed the “the moral economy of Aquinas.”. (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...

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)

At times of crisis, existing institutional arrangements of societies are thrown into question. Crises that occur in multiple societies simultaneously present rare opportunities for comparative empirical analysis. Social theory can reveal the framing conditions of the responses to crises and the sources of variations between them. This paper compares the immediate responses of the Australian, UK and US governments to the global COVID-19 pandemic, particularly with regard to financing lockdowns, and points out significant differences between the three approaches. Drawing on (...) Polanyi’s method of institutional analysis, we compare the responses of these same national groups to an earlier crisis, the Japanese prisoner of war camps during the Second World War, to show similar patterns of integration recurring eight decades apart. This analysis shows that aspects of moral economies that are not usually apparent can become pronounced during crises, and points to the importance of enduring social imaginaries. (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)

The significance of giving as a contemporary socio-economic practice has been obscured both by mainstream economics and by the influence of the anthropological tradition. Andrew Sayer’s concept of moral economy offers a more fruitful framework for an economic sociology of contemporary giving, and one that appears to be largely consistent with social quality approaches. This article analyzes giving from the perspective of moral economy, questioning the view that giving is a form of exchange, and opening up the prospect of seeing (...) it as the outcome of a more complex constellation of causal factors. It uses examples from the digital economy, in particular the phenomenon of open-source software, which nicely illustrates both the progressive potential of digital gifts and the ways in which they can be absorbed into the commercial economy. (shrink)

The moral economy of American medicine has been transformed by contentious innovations in organization, administration, regulation, and finance. In many settings old fee-for-service incentives and disincentives have been replaced by those of ``managed care,'' while in other settings they have been diluted or distorted. In the everyday care of patients, old and new may alternate or interact. These innovations may also be having secondary effects on participation in life-sciences research and the development and employment of new technologies, discouraging collective support (...) for preliminary investigation and delaying adoption of improved goods and services until cost-reducing potential has already been realized. This motivational complexity, particularly in its moral dimensions, is hard to address using standard assumptions and methods. I argue for different assumptions, based on the clinical behavior of individual patients rather than the market behavior of aggregated consumers, and I describe a different method, based on an old idea in political economy. I then present a new way to explain the core obligations of clinicians, researchers, and planners and to interpret the policy problems they must now share. (shrink)

Within thirty years of first appearing, the networked digital economy has spread its tentacles into the lives of half the population of the world, and transformed the balance of power in the commercial economy. Social theory has been slow to recognize the significance and scale of these developments, and this special issue is a contribution to redressing the balance. It is organized around the concept of moral economies: the values and norms that underpin and shape our participation in larger economic (...) structures. The digital economy today is the site of a range of competing economic models, and this is reflected in clashes between a corresponding range of moral economies. The contributors to this special issue map these tensions in examples of both gift and commodity models of economy, analyse the implications for global risk, and re-evaluate classic analytic schemes to represent these tensions. Because the economy is built on moral economies, the process of economic change is already inherently a process of debate and contestation between different moral economies, with the consequence that academic work on the ethics of the economy can influence these processes of change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Economy, Society, Tragedy: Moral Reflections in an Age of Crisis and Austerity LOUIS A. RUPRECHT JR. Precisely their tragedies prove that the Greeks were not pessimists... In this sense, I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher—that is to say, the most extreme antithesis and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. —Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy” Orgiastic religion leads most readily to song and (...) music; ritualistic religion inclines toward the pictorial arts; religions enjoining love favor the development of poetry and music. In all of this, the one important fact for us is the significance of the marked rejection of all distinctively aesthetic devices by those religions which are rational, in our special sense. —Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion tragedy and society The title of this review essay is taken from Max Weber’s posthumous magnum opus, Economy and Society,1 an ambitious and wide-ranging comparative sociological analysis of economic orders, social orders and the normative structures that both emerge from and lend meaning to the intersecting economic, political and religious spheres in which complex human arion 28.2 fall 2020 Kathryn A. Kozaitis, Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece’s Second City (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 248 pages. This book is the fifteenth in Oxford’s important series, “Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology,” edited by Carla Freeman and Li Zhang. 138 economy, society, tragedy societies take shape. To Weber’s grand and capacious sociological categories, economy and society, I have added a third literary and philosophical term: tragedy. Now, to be sure, Weber thought a great deal about tragedy,2 and was drawn to tragic themes in many of his most salient and influential sociological studies. One need think only of his account of the bureaucratic “routinization” of prophetic charisma in The Sociology of Religion,3 or his depiction of modern humanity’s self-imposed “iron cage” in the rousing final pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,4 a text to which I will return at the end of this essay.5 But tragedy entails far more than systemic collapse or self-inflicted disaster. In this essay, I want to explore some of the implications of combining close attention to the lived experience of concrete individuals to the highly theoretical, systems-level analysis inspired by such Weberian categories. Put another way, how may Cultural Anthropology, and more specifically Ethnography, deepen such a globally-oriented Sociology? Here, I intend to supplement Weber’s sociological dyad, economy and society, with a conception of tragedy drawn from the cognate social sciences of Comparative Religion and Cultural Anthropology; I will be using Attic Greek tragedy as a benchmark. More specifically, I wish to highlight some of the ways in which the first book-length ethnographic study of the Greek economic crisis may add vital nuance to Weber’s more theoretical, world-systems approach. That book is Kathryn Kozaitis’s Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece’s Second City, an ethnographic study of the lived reality of Greeks experiencing the double -whammy of a sovereign debt crisis and externally imposed austerity regimes in the Greek city of Thessaloniki; the book is the fifteenth to appear inOxford’s “Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology” series, edited by Carla Freeman and Li Zhang. As Kozaitis demonstrates with sensitivity and eloquence, by zeroing in on the people, rather than the economic policies or the social and administrative structures, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. 139 certain normative categories and ethical stances become more relevant, many of them implicated in ancient Greek tragedy, and drama more broadly. tragic crises appropriately to a work of cultural ethnography, Kozaitis links the personal to her profession; further still, she weaves her own personal story into the story of the people to whom she is attempting to give voice. This, she notes, constitutes “the auto-ethnography in this ethnography” (4–6). How, then, did this professor of Cultural Anthropology, based in the United States, find her way to Greece’s “second city”? The path was circuitous, and its destination unclear for quite some time. That Kozaitis’s personal... (shrink)

Neoclassical and Austrian economic theory lend support to a conception of laissez‐faire capitalism as an ideal scheme of cooperation in which individual decisions are harmonized, and income is distributed according to one's productive contribution. Keynes's critique of this conception has an often‐overlooked moral dimension, according to which the coordination problems that trouble real‐world market economies produce an arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and income.

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 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)

The Idea of a Moral Economy is the first modern edition and English translation of three questions disputed at the University of Paris in 1330 by the theologian Gerard of Siena. The questions represent the most influential late medieval formulation of the natural law argument against usury and the illicit acquisition of property. Together they offer a particularly clear example of scholastic ideas about the nature and purpose of economic activity and the medieval concept of a moral economy. In his (...) introduction, editor Lawrin Armstrong discusses Gerard's arguments and considers their significance both within the context of scholastic philosophy and law and as a critique of contemporary mainstream economics. His analysis demonstrates how Gerard's work is not only a valuable source for understanding economic thought in pre-modern Europe, but also a fertile resource for scholars of law, economics, and philosophy in medieval Europe and beyond. (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)

This book offers a provocative analysis of the neuroscience of morality. Written by three leading scholars of science, medicine, and bioethics, it critiques contemporary neuroscientific claims about individual morality and notions of good and evil. Winner of a 2021 prize from the Expanded Reason Institute, it connects moral philosophy to neoliberal economics and successfully challenges the idea that we can locate morality in the brain. Instead of discovering the source of morality in the brain as they claim to do, the (...) popularizers of contemporary neuroscience are shown to participate in an understanding of human behavior that serves the vested interests of contemporary political economy. Providing evidence that the history of claims about morality and brain function reach back 400 years, the authors locate its genesis in the beginnings of modern philosophy, science, and economics. They further map this trajectory through the economic and moral theories of Francis Bacon, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the Chicago School of Economics to uncover a pervasive colonial anthropology at play in the neuroscience of morality today. The book concludes with a call for a humbler and more constrained neuroscience, informed by a more robust human anthropology that embraces the nobility, beauty, frailties, and flaws in being human. (shrink)

In the 1990s, the Dutch astronomical community had to choose its next big telescope project. The starting point of their discussions was not a plan in search of support, but a scientific community in search of a plan. Their discussion demonstrates how big science projects are an integral part of the moral and institutional economy of modern astronomy. Large telescopes are unique but not exceptional: big science has become part of “normal science,” both scientifically and institutionally. In retrospect, the discussions (...) anaylized in this paper discussions concern the earliest phase of three major astronomical instruments: the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the Square Kilometer Array, and the Low Frequency Array. Interestingly, the Dutch astronomers focused on what they called “strategic” arguments, explicitly excluding arguments regarding scientific merit. I demonstrate how this should be understood in the context of the moral economy of the community. This analysis, based on rich archive material and background interviews with key actors, adds to our understanding of big science or “megascience” in the post–Cold War era. (shrink)

There is increased interest in deviant behavior in the workplace. However, research is lacking on the moral economy of such behavior. Moral economy is particularly important in contexts where syncretic forces impinge on deviant behavior. Consequently, we use moral economy reasoning to examine the relationship between ethnic obligation and deviant behavior in the African context. In Study 1, data (_N_ = 27, 148) show an inverted U-shape effect of meta-agency and deviant behavior. In Study 2, difference-in-difference (DID) analysis of data (...) (_N_ = 25,387 in 2005 and _N _= 51,587 in 2013) shows significant DID effect of meta-agency. Primary data from Study 3 (_N_ = 229) shows a U-shaped effect of agency and deviant behavior. In Study 4 (_N_ = 333), a replication shows support for the U-shape effect in Study 3. The four studies thus show complex patterns that reflect U-shape and inverted U-shape relationships between ethnic obligation and deviant behavior as indicated by bribery, corruption, and unethicality. Robustness checks support the curvilinear relationships suggesting that the effects are not due to chance. We discuss implications for research and practice. (shrink)

The global development of human embryonic stem cell science and its therapeutic applications are dependent on the nature of its engagement at national and international levels with key cultural values and beliefs concerning the moral status of the early human embryo. This article argues that the political need to reconcile the promise of new health technologies with the cultural costs of scientific advance, dependent in this case on the use of the human embryo, has been met by the evolution of (...) bioethics as a political community, transnational network, and bureaucratic device. Bioethics has become the political means for the creation of a global moral economy where the trading and exchange of values is normalized and legitimated. As a result of such trading, value compromises are produced capable of legitimizing the regulatory policies necessary for maintaining public trust in the new science. (shrink)

Le présent article se propose de reconstruire la dialectique entre nécessité et liberté dans l’œuvre de Rousseau – du Discours sur l’inégalité à La profession de foi – à partir de l’analyse de La Morale sensitive ou le Matérialisme du sage, «écrit fantôme» projeté durant le séjour à l’Ermitage du 1756. Dans cette oeuvre inachevée Jean-Jacques se proposait d’enquêter sur l’influence que les objets extérieurs ont nécessairement sur l’intériorité de l’être humain pour, ensuite, envisager une réforme de l’âme axée sur (...) la possibilité de «forcer l’économie animale à favoriser l’ordre moral». On tentera de montrer ici comment le rêve intellectuel consistant à garantir la liberté morale par le biais de la nécessité physique a profondément influencé l’évolution de la dialectique rousseauiste entre nécessité et liberté, d’un niveau biologico-anthropologique à un niveau plus strictement philosophique. Le défi de Rousseau consiste à expliquer l’influence nécessaire du physique sur le moral, tout en sauvegardant – par la définition d’un dualisme spécifique – la liberté absolue de la dimension morale, ainsi que son caractère spécifique de qualité humaine. (shrink)

This article explores a historical challenge for contemporary accounts of the role that the desire of being esteemed can play in exercising social control. According to Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, the economy of esteem normally has two aspects: it is supportive of virtuous action and it occurs spontaneously. The analysis of esteem presented by the 18th‐century materialist Claude‐Adrien Helvétius challenges the intuition that these two aspects go together unproblematically. This is so because, in Helvétius's view, the desire for esteem (...) is always triggered by sensible interest. In the frequent situations where sensible interest diverges from the demands of virtue, the economy of esteem thus can be spontaneous but will not be supportive of virtue. Helvétius allows for cases of moral luck where sensible interest coincides with the demands of virtue but regards these cases as rare occurrences. This is why he believes that a functioning economy of esteem crucially depends on political constitutions—in which case the economy of esteem can be supportive of virtue but will not be spontaneous. (shrink)