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Business Ethics as a Science pp 35–70Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Economics and Ethics after the 1950s

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Abstract

In this chapter we will provide a survey of approaches to methodological relationships between economics and ethics suggested by various economists and philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century. We will start with neoclassical divorce from ethics, then we will consider several authors who provided their variants of reconsidering this divorce and discuss methodologically strong and weak points in their suggestions. In the end we will summarize and provide several generalizations and ideas on collaboration of economics and ethics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the 1970, Amartya Sen published a paper, “The impossibility of Paretian Liberal” (Sen 1970), which explained a paradox—liberal choice led to Pareto-inefficient outcome. However, there was no paradox if we remember Coase’s theorem. It was just a limited understanding of liberal choice not assuming possibility contracts and compensation. The resolution of Sen’s paradox on the basis Coase’s theorem was shown few years later by A. Gibbard in his paper “A Pareto-consistent libertarian claim” (Gibbard 1974). If people can freely alienate their rights or negotiate compensations , the Pareto equilibrium may be achieved.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Management, St. Petersburg University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Maxim Storchevoy

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Storchevoy, M. (2018). Economics and Ethics after the 1950s. In: Business Ethics as a Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68861-9_2

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