Abstract
The critical approach to critiquing economics taken by Geoffrey Brennan and Hayden Wilkinson is a valuable and interesting attempt to defend the methods developed by modern economics, not least against the challenges posed to them in this volume. The building blocks of this approach, however, rest on several inaccurate assumptions about economics as science, relation between economic phenomena and theory that describes them, objectivity of economic concepts, and descriptive rather then prescriptive character of economic tenets. The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it identifies and clarifies the missing elements in the attempted defence of economics. Secondly, it enlarges upon the idea behind the Homo Curator project which is to re-establish the connection between economic theory and the material as well as ethical boundaries of the reality it describes so that descriptive accuracy of the discipline can be restored.
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Notes
- 1.
It is a measure of the seriousness of the break with Aristitelian metaphysics that as distinguished a thinker as Joseph Schumpeter (1954) could assert that „Even Aristotle... presented an exceedingly poor and above all ‘pre-scientidfic’ picture of economicswhich does not differ substantially from that of laymen of all ages” before proceeding to nevertheless acknowledge Aristotle’s important contributions and achievements.
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Róna, P. (2024). Response from Péter Róna. In: Róna, P., Zsolnai, L., Wincewicz-Price, A. (eds) Homo Curator: Towards the Ethics of Consumption. Virtues and Economics, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51700-6_8
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