Table Of ContentVirtues and Economics
Peter Róna · László Zsolnai Editors
Economic
Objects and
the Objects of
Economics
Virtues and Economics
Volume 3
Series Editors
Peter Róna, University of Oxford, UK
László Zsolnai, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
Editorial Advisory Board
Helen Alford, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (“Angelicum”), Rome,
Italy
Luk Bouckaert, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
Luigino Bruni, LUMSA University, Rome and Sophia University Institute, Loppiano
Georges Enderle, University of Notre Dame, USA
Carlos Hoevel, Catholic University of Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina
John Loughlin, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford and Von Hügel Institute
David W. Miller, Princeton University, USA
Sanjoy Mukherjee, Rajiv Gandhi Indian Institute of Management Shillong, India
Mike Thompson, GoodBrand, London, CEIBS Shanghai, and University of Victoria,
Vancouver, Canada
Johan Verstraeten, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
Stefano Zamagni, University of Bologna, and Johns Hopkins University – SAIS
Europe and Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Italy
The series is dedicated to virtue ethics and economics. Its purpose is to relocate
economic theory to a domain where the connection between the virtues and
economic decisions, as that connection is actually experienced in everyday life, is
an organic component of theory rather than some sort of an optionally added
ingredient. The goal is to help develop a virtue-based economic theory which
connects virtues with the contents of economic activities of individuals,
unincorporated and incorporated economic agents. The primary context is Catholic
Social Teaching but other faith traditions (especially Judaism, Islam, Hinduism,
Buddhism, and Confucianism) will also be explored for their construction of virtues
in economic action. Special attention will be made to regulatory and policy issues
in promoting economic justice.
The series connects virtue ethics with the core of economic theory and practice.
It examines the basic and irreducible intentionality of human activities concerned
with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. It considers
the incommensurability of values as the central problem of economic decision
making and examines whether that problem can be overcome by any means other
than practical reason.
This series will cover high quality edited volumes and monographs.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15627
Peter Róna • László Zsolnai
Editors
Economic Objects and the
Objects of Economics
Editors
Peter Róna László Zsolnai
Blackfriars Hall Business Ethics Center
University of Oxford Corvinus University of Budapest
St. Giles, Oxford, UK Budapest, Hungary
Includes one non exclusive license agreement - Dave Colander: Is Economics a Moral
Science?
ISSN 2520-1794 ISSN 2520-1808 (electronic)
Virtues and Economics
ISBN 978-3-319-94528-6 ISBN 978-3-319-94529-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94529-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949115
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Preface
The papers collected in this second volume of our Virtues and Economics series
were delivered at a symposium held at the Las Casas Institute, Blackfriars Hall,
Oxford University on 7th and 8th of July, 2017. Papers delivered at previous sym-
posia, also at the Las Casas Institute and the Catholic University of Leuven, were
published in our previous volume titled Economics as a Moral Science.
These papers concern the moral content of economic life and the capacity of
economic theory to accommodate that moral content. Our first volume traced and
reflected the transformation of economics as a moral science into an analytic disci-
ple and the consequences of that transformation. The essays in this volume address,
from a variety of perspectives, the ontological characteristics of the subject matter
of the discipline and challenge the assumption that the methodology of the natural
sciences can be productively applied to the economy.
The exclusion of the moral dimension of economic life from the axioms, models,
and paradigms of modern economic theory, the notion that the economy is the prod-
uct of the sorts of law-like regularities that characterise the natural sciences instead
of being the product of human will, desire and action have had increasingly trou-
bling consequences. Instead of the sort of stability that the discovery of law-like
regularities are expected to secure, the search for analogies between the natural and
the social sciences has generated increasing social, economic, environmental and
political instability. If the wealth of the world has greatly increased, so has human
suffering. A re-examination of the foundations of modern economic theory seems to
be needed.
The editors would like to thank the authors of these papers for their contribution
and to express their enthusiastic support of the dialogue that has developed among
them. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Mallinckrodt Foundation
for its generous financial support without which these symposia could not have been
organised, and thank the Las Casas Institute for its hospitality and administrative
support to the 2017 symposium.
Peter Róna
László Zsolnai
v
Acknowledgement
The editors would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the
Mallinckrodt Foundation to the workshop held at Blackfriars Hall in 2017.
vii
Contents
Part I Introduction
1 Ontology and Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Peter Róna
Part II The Importance of Ontology
2 Objects of Nature and Objects of Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Peter Róna
3 Positioning and the Nature of Social Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Stephen Pratten
4 Central Fallacies of Modern Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Tony Lawson
Part III O ntology of Modern Economics
5 Social Scientific Naturalism Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Daniel M. Hausman
6 Is Economics a Moral Science? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
David Colander
7 New Theoretical City or Dispersed Tribes?
An Exploration Journey through Contemporary Heterodox
Economics and Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Carlos Hoevel
ix
x Contents
Part IV Temporality, Reactivity and Crowding
8 Rational Choice Theory and Backward- Looking Motives . . . . . . . . . 117
Roger Teichmann
9 Time-Value in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Kevin T. Jackson
10 The Crucial Role of Reactivity in Economic Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Bruno S. Frey
11 Economic Actors and the Ultimate Goal of the Economy . . . . . . . . . . 151
László Zsolnai
Part V Implications for Economic Policy
12 How Does the Methodology of Neoclassical Economics Eliminate
the Question of Fairness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Zoltán Pogátsa
13 Economics Is a Moral Science: A Value Based Approach . . . . . . . . . . 169
Arjo Klamer
Part VI C onclusion
14 Postscript on Ontology and Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Peter Róna
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
About the Contributors
David Colander is Distinguished College Professor at Middlebury College,
Vermont, USA. He has authored, co-authored, or edited 30 books and over 100
articles on a wide range of topics. These include Principles of Economics (McGraw-
Hill), History of Economic Thought (with Harry Landreth) (Houghton Mifflin),
Macroeconomics (with Ed Gamber) (Prentice Hall), Why Aren't Economists as
Important as Garbagemen? (Sharpe), and MAP: A Market Anti-Inflation Plan (with
Abba Lerner) (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). He received his Ph.D. from Columbia
University and has taught at Columbia University, Vassar College, the University of
Miami, and Princeton University. He has been on the board of numerous economic
societies and has been Vice President and President of the Eastern Economic
Association and Vice-President of the History of Economic Thought Society. His
latest work focuses on economic education, complexity, and the methodology
appropriate to applied policy economics.
Bruno S. Frey is Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Basel. He was
Professor of Economics at the University of Konstanz from 1970–1977 and at the
University of Zurich from 1977–2012, Distinguished Professor of Behavioral
Science at the Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, UK from
2010–2013 and Senior Professor of Economics at Zeppelin University
Friedrichshafen, DE from 2013–2015. He is Research Director of CREMA – Center
for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts and Co-Founder of CREW –
Center for Research in Economics and Well-Being at the University of Basel. He
was Managing Editor, from 1969–2015, and is now Honorary Editor of Kyklos.
Bruno Frey seeks to extend economics beyond standard neo-classics by including
insights from other disciplines, including political science, psychology and
sociology.
Daniel M. Hausman is Herbert A. Simon and Hilldale Professor at the Department
of Philosophy of University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He has taught at the
University of Maryland at College Park, Carnegie Mellon University, and he has
visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the London School of Economics.
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