Economics and Ethics

Abstract

First paragraph: One of the greatest barriers to meaningful debate within and about economics has been the successful mainstream rhetoric that economics is a technical subject. Where economics is presented as a science, ethical considerations are deemed to belong to non-science. According to this view, the economist’s role is to produce technical results to be handed over as expert advice to policy makers, for them to use according to their (separable) ethical principles. Where the issue of ethics has arisen within mainstream academic economics, it has tended to refer to the kind of generic academic ethics applied by funding bodies, employers of consultants and publication outlets: not to plagiarise, to declare conflicts of interest, not to be abusive, and so on. While important in themselves, these are ethics of personal behaviour which are considered to be independent of research methodology and research content.