Syllabi and Books on Ethics and Economics

You should talk to John Roemer at Yale. I took a class with him last semester and he will be able to give you exactly what you need.

As for books (these might be so obvious that you’ve already thought of them- sorry if so) I’d think clear places to start would be Elizabeth Anderson’s _Value in Ethics and Economics_ and perhaps Daiel Hausman and Michael McPherson’s _Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy_. Sen’s _On Ethics and Economics_ is probably the even more obvious choice, though I’ve not read it myself so can’t say if it’s the sort of thing you’re looking for. John Broome’s _Ethics out of Economics_ might also be useful, though in the papers from it I’ve read it’s more meta-ethics than on the relationship between ethics and economics. I’d be interested in seeing your syllabus when it’s done!

My bias would be to include some non-academic readings, so I recommend Jews, Money and Social Responsbility, which I know of only because a long-ago professor included it in his class.

Dave Schmidtz at Arizona seems to have something relevant: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~schmidtz/teaching.html. It’s hidden behind a password, though.

David Graeber’s Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams is worth a look.

For “ethical reflection on economic life” some of Joseph Heath’s books might be good- his book specifically on economics that’s just come out, his _Nation of Rebels: Why Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture_, and his _The Efficient Society_ might all be worth looking at. I haven’t read them, but they sound like the sort of thing you might be interested in, and I think Heath is, in general, quite a good philosopher- everything by him I have read has been very good.

Isn’t homo economicus amoral? (Not a rhetorical question.)

UCL economics department runs a third year undergrad course on ethics in applied economics; might be interesting given its taught in a pretty, err… how to say this delicately, economicsy department.

Several of the books mentioned above came to mind to me as well but I think “ethical reflection on economic life and economic systems” in toto is fairly uncommon if not rare: Perhaps it’s best to look back to the likes of Tawney, Ruskin and Gandhi (or more recently, an E.F. Schumacher) for material of that sort although only the first comes close to writing anything “systematic.” (In addition to Simmel, Werner Sombart has written insightful stuff on the sociology of capitalism with an ethical or moral bite to it.)

It’s hard, I suspect, for professional economists and philosophers more or less enchanted by neo-classical economics to attain the critical distance or broad perspective that is required for the type of ethical reflection you appear to be seeking here (i.e., given what you’ve said about Hausman and McPherson as well as Sen). And of course many Marxist or socialist critiques are dispositionally adverse to this type of reflection, at least inasmuch as it is avowedly ethical: Michael Luntley, R.G. Peffer and, to some extent, David Schweickart, might be considered exceptions to the rule (as is, most recently, Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, 2008). Folks like Philip Mirowski, S.M. Amadae, and Nicholas Xenos often contain critiques motivated by ethical insight or that are chock full of ethical implications. And I would think some of the more sophisticated environmentalist literature would also be germane here.

It may be that it takes a worldview to critique a worldview in the sense that only a worldview not beholden to some of the presuppositions of contemporary economic life and systems provides us with the critical distance to have anything ethically original, provocative or persuasive to say on the subject: thus, for instance, we might look to Catholic social teachings (on the dignity of labor, etc., and filtered through, for example, something on the order of Liberation Theology or Catholic Worker philosophy), Buddhist ethics, even Hellenistic ethics, for uncommon or unique ethical reflections of this sort. Some of these may amount to something like “civilizational critiques.”

Finally, it should be the case that anything of this sort consider the role of industry and technology as part and parcel of modern economic systems and life for it often seems the case (largely owing to the professional division of academic labor) that literature under the rubric of “philosophy of technology” is comparatively neglected in such discussions.

Putnam is in most respects, as he acknowledges, beholden to Sen, although I think what he has to say about fact/value entanglement (which he’s been writing about at least since Reason, Truth and History (1981) in general should be standard fare for those tackling “economics and ethics” questions.

Myrdal wrote a lot on the fact-value distinction back in the 60s and 70s, though that may not be exactly what you are looking for.

There’s also a fair bit around the place on the related questions of whether Christians can consistently hold free-market economic views and whether conservatives can be comfortably with the socially corrosive effects of unconstrained markets. In both cases, most of the literature tries hard, and unsuccessfully, to avoid the obvious negative answers.

Ingrid

Having taken two econ courses where these sorts of issues were integrated within – rather than taught stand alone – the regular Micro curriculum, two pieces of advice:

1. Don’t put the word “egalitarianism” in the course title. Surely, this is just bias? Egalitarianism is one very small part of ethics. While Yale’s Roemer is interesting, you must remember he is/was an Analytical Marxist, which is just Das Kapital with calculus.

2. Name your course Distributive Justice. You can treat it either historically or thematically. The main course I took, which dealt with this, included Marx, Hayek, Berlin, Rawls, and Nozick. It was wonderful.

If you really want your students to get passionate over economics and ethics, you could include readings from Ayn Rand, particularly Atlas Shrugged. Perhaps you could call the course, Who Is John Galt?

Depending on how far you want to go back in history. The Roman Catholic Scholastic “theory of just price” was much discussed in universities and elsewhere in the 12/14th century. The theory of “Just Price” integrates aspects of Aristotle and Augustine on property rights, as well as the traditional Abrahamic strictures on usury. Though maybe such a course might be a bit beyond the education level of your typical Economics Masters student.

If you’re going to teach Rawls, then it might also be useful to look at some of the critiques against him. G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality springs to mind on that regard.

In inverse chronological order and ascending order of literary merit: Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (there may well be some more useful Veblen), and John Ruskin, Unto This Last.

It might be worth knowing about Geoff Brennan @ the ANU.

http://philosophy.unc.edu/brennan.htm / http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/people-defaults/brennan/index.php3

I can’t speak for McCloskey’s book (Bourgeios Virtues) but it may be worth a look: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=176332

As an application, environmental ethics and environmental economics are a possibility — http://www.colorado.edu/economics/morey/4999Ethics/4999syl.pdf is one random thing I found with a quick search, as is this: http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-063122968X.html

It’s also worth noting that some of the “behavioural economics” results that are coming out of experimental economics have a moral/ethical component. (Ultimatum games, cooperation games and so on, in which people exhibit more complex behaviours than simple “free riding” or whatever.)

Two movie suggestions: “The Corporation” ( http://www.thecorporation.com ) and “The Yes Men” ( http://www.theyesmen.org ).

One book suggestion: “Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals” by Kant. Kant’s Categorical Imperative offers a competing idea of rationality. How would Kant play the Prisoner’s Dilemma? :)

And how can you leave out John Stuart Mill? Isn’t a discussion of utilitarianism central to ethics and economics?

I’ll second Harry and Dsquared.

Read “Capitalism and Freedom”, and “The Affluent Society”; it’s a good starting point for thinking about both economics and ethics.

Lots of good stuff here. For non-academic stuff you could look at the Papal Encyclical Populorum Progressio.

You might want to look at Michael Sandel’s recent work, including his Reith Lectures, which focused on how allowing more and more of social distribution to occur within markets commoditizes parts of life that had operated under different value structures, and that this movement is not always but often corrosive of individual character and public good. These themes are also operating in Sandel’s book “The Case Against Perfection” which opposes some biotechnological possibilities in a way that goes very much against the utilitarian grain.

Also, there’s the BBC television documentary, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. I thought it was a bit lightweight, and disagreed with it in plenty of places, but it might be a good starting point for a discussion.

I took a course called “Theories of Economic Justice” that was a Political Theory course taught to BA and MA students (I was BA at the time) to the best of my memory the reading list was: 2nd Treatise Locke, “Rights of Man”, and “Agrarian Justice” by Paine, Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”, “Democratic Justice” by Ian Shapiro, “Stakeholder Society” – Ackerman and Alstott, something by Philip van Parijs in favor of Basic Income, and a critique of van Parijs and Alstott and Ackerman by Carole Pateman, “Talented Tenth” and its memorial address by W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Louis Gates’ half of “The Future of The Race” as well as something about Katrina called “Stormy Weather”

For a more recent work, you might try “The Morality of Money: An Exploration in Analytic Philosophy” by Adrian Walsh and Tony Lynch.

How about a book about a completely new economic theory that relates rising unemployment to overpopulation? The biggest obstacle we face in changing attitudes toward overpopulation is economists. Since the field of economics was branded “the dismal science” after Malthus’ theory, economists have been adamant that they would never again consider the subject of overpopulation and continue to insist that man is ingenious enough to overcome any obstacle to further growth. This is why world leaders continue to ignore population growth in the face of mounting challenges like peak oil, global warming and a whole host of other environmental and resource issues. They believe we’ll always find technological solutions that allow more growth.

But because they are blind to population growth, there’s one obstacle they haven’t considered: the finiteness of space available on earth. The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.

If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like.

Please forgive the somewhat spammish nature of the previous paragraph, but I don’t know how else to inject this new theory into the debate about overpopulation without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.

Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”

“The Bourgeois Virtues” by Deidre McCloskey

Pete Murphy: “a completely new economic theory that relates rising unemployment to overpopulation”

Well, when you are unemployed you have time on your hands. . . .

;)

Sorry, Pete, I couldn’t resist.

On the non-market economy and relations within families that have an economic aspect, Stein Ringen’s book “What Democracy is For” has a lot of data and some provocative analysis. The book’s webpage is http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8419.html, his webpage http://users.ox.ac.uk/~gree0074/.

Ingrid,

I am currently preparing a similar course. So this list of suggestions arrived just at the right moment. Thanks to all for the suggestions.
I just add some references that were on my provisonary list and were not mentioned yet.

Amartya Sen, “The Moral Standing of the Market”, Social Philosophy and Policy 2/2 (1985), 1-19.
David Gauthier, Morals by agreement, OUP, 1986.
see also Dan Hausman, “Are markets morally free zones?”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 18/4 (Autumn 1989), 317-333.
Friedrich August von Hayek, “The use of knowledge in society”, reprinted in Individualism and Economic Order, Chicago, UCP, 1948, 77-91.
John C. Harsanyi, “Morality and the theory of rational behaviour”, in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (eds.), Utilitarianism and Beyond, CUP, 1982.

Depending on the background of the students (economics rather than philosophy) it is sometimes interesting to let them read an economics paper which leads to interesting normative discussions, like

Akerlof, George A. (1970). “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market
Mechanism”. Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3): 488–500.

or T.S. Schelling’s paper on getto-formation.

Other suggestions:
Geoffrey Brennan, “Five Rational Actor Accounts of the Welfare State”, Kyklos 2/3 (2001), 213-234.

Arrow, KJ, 1963, Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care, American
Economic Review, 53, 941-73.

Jon Elster, “Social Norms and Economic Theory”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 3 (1989), 99-117.

Kahneman, D, Knetsch, JL, Thaler, RH (1986b) Fairness as a constraint in profitseeking:
Entitlements in the market. American Economic Review. 76(4): 728-741.

Geert