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Economics and Vulnerability: Relationships, Incentives, Meritocracy

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Economics as a Moral Science

Part of the book series: Virtues and Economics ((VIEC,volume 1))

Abstract

The paper warns that a significant body of philosophical work in virtue ethics is associated with a critique of the market economy and economics. The market depends on instrumental rationality and extrinsic motivation ; market interactions therefore fail to respect the internal value of human practices and the intrinsic motivations of human actors. By using market exchange as a central model, mainstream economics normalizes extrinsic motivation, not only in markets but also in social life more generally; therefore economics appears as an assault on virtues and on human flourishing .

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A certain philosophy of otherness, from Emmanuel Lévinas to Roberto Esposito, feels that it must overcome this Thou/alter-ego in an external “he/she” that makes relationality open and transcendent: “All the rhetoric of the excess of the other notwithstanding, in a one-on-one comparison, the other is conceivable only and ever in relation to the ‘I’. The other cannot be but non-self, its reverse and its shadow” (Esposito 2009: 129).

  2. 2.

    In Bruni (2006) there is a reconstructed this historical evolution that led to the rise of modern individualist economics; see this work for further study.

  3. 3.

    There would be much to say regarding the Protestant culture in which both Hobbes and Smith worked; the rejection of mediators in fact created other mediators that, in the long run, are emerging as tyrants no less fierce than those of pre-modern times.

  4. 4.

    Roberto Esposito in fact points out that the most radical contradiction is not the one between community and society (as in classic social thought) but between communitas and immunitas.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. LUMSA University, Rome, Italy

    Luigino Bruni

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  1. Luigino Bruni
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Correspondence to Luigino Bruni .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Peter Rona

  2. European SPES Institute, Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary, Leuven, Belgium

    Laszlo Zsolnai

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Bruni, L. (2017). Economics and Vulnerability: Relationships, Incentives, Meritocracy. In: Rona, P., Zsolnai, L. (eds) Economics as a Moral Science. Virtues and Economics, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53291-2_9

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