Economics and Ethics

Considering MyJihad

Jonathan B. Wight

Public education campaign called MyJihad featured in an advertisement on the side of a Chicago bus. (Courtesy of myjihad.org).

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, attorney Qasim Rashid helps us to understand the true meaning of Jihad:

As a Muslim American, #MyJihad begins every night—get to bed on time so I can wake for pre-dawn prayer and nourish my soul. #MyJihad is not skipping a healthy breakfast—as our Starbucks society is prone to tempt—and thus properly nourish my body. #MyJihad ensures I spend time daily in service to humanity—charity, volunteer work, and mentoring—to nourish my personal moral development. And finally, #MyJihad is to read and learn about ideas that challenge my thinking—to nourish my intellect and foster pluralism.

And all the while, #MyJihad reminds me to treat those who malign, misdirect, and misinform Americans about jihad, with respect and decency—because that is the example prophet Muhammad set for all Muslims. As an American Muslim, #MyJihad is to properly define jihad with my actions of service and love—never hate.

So what is #MyJihad? It is a grassroots public educational and service campaign started by MyJihad.org. The campaign is designed to provide a unifying storm with bus ads, on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and news media. It is an inspiring phenomenon, as people of all walks of faith affiliation and non-affiliation—Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew, atheist, and more are uniting to share their struggle towards self-improvement and overcoming the odds in their lives.

#MyJihad defines jihad correctly as—not holy war—but struggle…. [O]nce upon returning from battle, Muhammad remarked, "We are returning from the lesser Jihad to engage in the greater Jihad—the Jihad against the self."

Seen in this light, jihad is the virtue ethics of self-control. Mohammed, a merchant, interacted with many people and understood that getting along meant learning to respect differences, especially in religion.

They say cutting wood warms you twice. And so does international trade: it makes you warmer in wealth and potentially warmer in worldview.

Justice and Christian Leadership

Jonathan B. Wight

Bishop John Shelby Spong was in Richmond a few weeks ago, giving five daily lectures to packed audiences at St. Paul's Church, where he had been the rector from 1969-1976. They were fascinating talks about the origins and history of Christianity and the "new" Christianity emerging in the coming Reformation. According to Spong, Reformations come every 500 years or so. Each reformation attempts to rectify anomalies, injustices, and mistakes of the past.

I was moved to read Spong's autobiography, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality (2000). He's written, by my count, over twenty other books that have inflamed as well as educated, and sold perhaps a million copies around the word.

The "New Christianity" that Spong preaches attempts to bridge 21^st century science and religion. The New Christianity embraces evolution and other sciences, including those that develop the biological origins of sexual orientation. The New Christianity emphasizes the equality of all people, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation. It is fundamentally a message about love, not judgment (see, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile, 1999).

Spong's entrance to the priesthood was in North Carolina in the mid-1950s, where overt racism was rampant. The battles he went through are legion; I don't know how someone develops that stamina and tough skin, although it was surely needed given the harassment and death threats of the KKK.

By the late 1960s Spong was preaching in Lynchburg Virginia. A particularly vitriolic editorial writer named Carter Glass III, publisher of the Lynchburg News (and grandson of Sen. Carter Glass, who had helped create the Federal Reserve in 1913 as well as co-author the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933), was determined to fight the Supreme Court's desegregation ruling more than a decade after it had been delivered. When Spong asked what Glass's motivation was, it turned out Glass believed that integration was part of the international communist conspiracy to infiltrate educational systems and encourage the breakdown of law and order. This wasn't the last time paranoia and fear stood in the way of dialogue and progress.

After fighting for racial integration and reconciliation, Spong became involved with the ordination of women. From there, his was a slow, but inevitable rise to leadership in promoting the rights of gays in the Episcopal Church and beyond, especially after he left Richmond to become Bishop of Newark in 1976. Spong was the first bishop to ordain an openly gay priest (although many gay priests were in the Episcopal Church, operating under "don't ask, don't tell").

Spong's take on leadership is particularly interesting in this book. A leader is not someone who spouts pious ethical statements. A leader has to organize the political fights that are inevitable any time change is proposed. Churches, like other organizations, unfortunately get populated by people who want to win more than they want to search for truth. Spong notes:

The [Christian] creeds were more about power than they were about truth. That some came to be called "orthodox" and their version of Christianity designated "orthodoxy" was not necessarily a recognition of who was right, but a recognition of who had won. The primary purpose of the creeds was not to spell out the Christian faith, but to exclude competing groups and their competing versions of truth from the church's life (pp. 242-243).

Adam Smith would love this story about the attempted monopolization—for personal gain—of the victors. That is why Smith so adamantly insisted on religious competition—exactly the sort of competition that the early creeds attempted to snuff out in the third century C.E. But there is also a psychological element:

Something deeply destructive is unleashed in some threatened human beings when they cannot keep the world from changing and in the process diminishing their power. They inevitably seek to destroy what they can no longer control (p. 48).

That sounds to me a lot like what is happening politically today and of course in ages past. Spong's last big official act as bishop before he retired in 2000 was to engage the Lambeth Conference in 1998. This once-a-decade event brings together the Anglican Communion from around the world. Bible literalists, and those opposed to gay priests, had formed a plan to repudiate Spong's inclusiveness. To carry this out Spong was vilified to African priests as a racist. This is both ironic and deeply hurtful, given his decades of work against racism in America. Spong's sin was to speak clearly in saying that opposition to gays and women (which is very strong in the African church) was based on unscientific beliefs. Nevertheless, the conservative bishops won, and passed a resolution on "Human Sexuality" that allowed no safe place for gays. And since then, of course, there has been the break-away of congregations from the Virginia Episcopal Diocese to the conservative Convocation of Anglicans in North America, supported by the Anglican Church of Nigeria.

The Episcopal Church, which in 2004 appointed an openly gay regional bishop and in 2006 elected a woman as overall Presiding Bishop, has congregations that are dropping and aging. Spong's hope is that a new enlightened and enlivened church will be born out of these ashes. His final lesson for "real" leaders—as opposed to stand-in leaders who like to wear the fancy robes and hats and take on titles—is this:

… losing a battle in the cause of justice is never a loss... the most important issue in life is not winning; it is being faithful to your core values (p. 211).

But justice and equality have generally been winning in the long run. I'm sure of very few things in life, but one of them is that 50 years from now the opponents of gay priests and female bishops will be looked upon as bizarre relics, just the way we look today at segregated bathrooms from the 1950s. Let's move on.

Christianity, Greed, and Markets

Jonathan B. Wight

Via Mark White comes this link to a New York Times blog post by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. Gutting attempts to get inside the Republican candidates' debates and argues that a clearer and more careful understanding comes from seeing things from "inside" their world view. Here are some excerpts:

We could greatly improve the quality of our political debates if we simply held to the philosophers' rule of understanding and charitably formulating our opponents' views.

In particular, there is a basic tension between the two main elements of the conservative view: Christian ethical values and the free enterprise system. Christian morality is a matter of love for others and self-sacrifice on their behalf. A market economy assumes that all agents (employers, workers, buyers, sellers) act in their own selfish interests. The problem is evident in the New Testament's unease with the wealthy and sympathy for the poor; see, for example, Matthew 13: 22, Mark 10: 23-25 and James 5: 1-3.

The standard response to this sort of moral objection is that the "invisible hand" of the market produces public goods out of private selfishness. If we all act for our own selfish ends, there will be far more material goods for us to share than there would be otherwise. But this is a utilitarian argument; that is, one that judges actions as moral because they increase our material happiness. Christian morality, however, denies that moral good and evil depend on what maximizes such happiness. Christian love and self-sacrifice, in particular, are moral goods in their own right, regardless of their consequences.

Mark White rightly flags the second paragraph. First, Gutting makes the sort of mistake that Ronald Coase identified: science has no goals, only people have goals. Hence, the market economy itself makes no assumptions about agents, only people do. And it was a standard practice of economists to make such assumptions about selfish agents in the 20^th century. But today such a view is largely obsolete. Anyone who has been reading Amartya Sen and Vernon Smith, or even anything written about Adam Smith, is by now aware that the old standard view is simply wrong.

Most markets—the ones that you and I frequent every day—do not operate in reality on the "greed is good" philosophy. To do so would be to alienate most customers. Yes, the butcher and the brewer and the baker want their lucre, but they acquire it within the context of a moral understanding—in which their self-interest is held in check by self-control and by genuine and natural feelings of benevolence and justice. Adam Smith, when writing about the invisible hand, explicitly noted that the "character" of the trader in a market was critically important to the operation of the invisible hand. For elaboration, see here.

Deirdre McCloskey has beautifully told this story in The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006). Paul Heyne also provided a lovely short analysis in "Moral Criticisms of Markets," The Senior Economist 10(4): April 1995 (link not available). My own academic novel, Saving Adam Smith, traces Adam Smith's views on the role of virtues in the marketplace and shows its relevance for business operations, even seemingly cut-throat computer chip businesses in Silicon Valley. There's plenty to read on this subject.

The bottom line is that markets and virtuousness (in the Christian sense) are entirely compatible. The most exciting development for the 21^st century is the rise of social entrepreneurs, who use the vehicle of a company and the institution of a market to lift people out of poverty and solve a myriad of problems. The motives can be many, and do not necessarily have to do with maximizing material consumption (think of all the entrepreneurs working to solve global warming or those solving local problems of survival by giving poor people access to markets). Profit is a necessary part of greasing the machine and making it sustainable over time. In a healthy competitive situation, profit is held in check.

No one would deny that the system breaks down sometimes, and there are many who use markets who are decidedly non-Christian in their pursuit of greed. But as McCloskey and Heyne make so clear, the motive of greed is operative under communism and all other systems as well—it is part of human nature. Nothing is perfect. But a competitive market is often the most transparent and easy way to deal with sociopaths like Bernie Madoff. That is not so say regulations are not needed. Even Adam Smith desired regulations in the financial sector to protect small savers.

So, while trying to get inside the world view of Republican candidates, Gutting does a service by calling attention to the need for understanding. But it is possible today to entirely rewrite his last two paragraphs using a more realistic science and philosophy of economics. I think his thesis still stands, crafted in a different way: The caricature of a market held by some Christians is that agents operate on the basis of greed and this caricature is indeed in opposition to Christian values. Much work remains to be done to overcome the ideological legacy of Scrooge and the "greed is good" image of entrepreneurs. Thanks to Gutting for bringing this to our attention.

Morals without God

Jonathan B. Wight

Frans de Waal, in “Morals without God,” argues against the view of some people of the cloth that without God there would be no morality.  Rather, morality arose for evolutionary purposes and is thus more ingrained in the human psyche than cultural and religious conceptions of right and wrong.  The evidence for this is in fellow primates.  De Waal states:

I interact on a daily basis with monkeys and apes, which just like us strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation. Yes, we use cell phones and fly airplanes, but our psychological make-up remains that of a social primate. Even the posturing and deal-making among the alpha males in Washington is nothing out of the ordinary….

Chimpanzees and bonobos will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to food, even if they lose part of it in the process. And capuchin monkeys are prepared to seek rewards for others….  A dog will repeatedly perform a trick without rewards, but refuse as soon as another dog gets pieces of sausage for the same trick.

While God isn’t needed for morality, according to de Waal, religions serve important purposes in society that should not be dismissed.  Hence, de Waal is sympathetic to religions and their morals, which provide a framework for social advances over the centuries:

And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch….

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality….It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion.

Hence, this leads to the conclusion:

[W]hat would happen if we were able to excise religion from society? I doubt that science and the naturalistic worldview could fill the void and become an inspiration for the good. Any framework we develop to advocate a certain moral outlook is bound to produce its own list of principles, its own prophets, and attract its own devoted followers, so that it will soon look like any old religion.

De Waal thus provides a defense of religion as a foundation for justice, which it certainly is.  But there are other defenses that rely on the pleasure created by religious practice itself—as in mysticism.  That is a topic for another day.

 

 

Assessing Competence to Refuse Medical Treatment

Mark D. White

Last night I read a wonderful and concise article by Jillian Craigie (King's College London) from the latest issue of Bioethics (25/6, July 2011) titled "Competence, Practical Rationality and What a Patient Values." The abstract follows:

According to the principle of patient autonomy, patients have the right to be self-determining in decisions about their own medical care, which includes the right to refuse treatment. However, a treatment refusal may legitimately be overridden in cases where the decision is judged to be incompetent. It has recently been proposed that in assessments of competence, attention should be paid to the evaluative judgments that guide patients' treatment decisions.

In this paper I examine this claim in light of theories of practical rationality, focusing on the difficult case of an anorexic person who is judged to be competent and refuses treatment, thereby putting themselves at risk of serious harm. I argue that the standard criteria for competence assess whether a treatment decision satisfies the goals of practical decision-making, and that this same criterion can be applied to a patient's decision-guiding commitments. As a consequence I propose that a particular understanding of practical rationality offers a theoretical framework for justifying involuntary treatment in the anorexia case.

Craigie argues for assessing the procedure--in this case, practical judgment--by which a person comesto the decision whether to refuse treatment, rather than applying external standards to the decision itself or the reasons that led to it. She emphasizes that in the past, simply exhibiting a behavior and expressing a preference that was characterized as or associated with a mental disorder was taken as evidence that the patient was "irrational." In the case of anorexia nervosa (on which she focuses in the article), if the patient expressed an overwhelming desire to be thin, this was judged to be irrational simply because that was one of the hallmarks of the disorder. Craigie correctly identifies this as circular reasoning, akin to listing homosexuality as a disorder and then "concluding" that homosexual desires are "pathological" (or interpreting denial of a problem as evidence of the problem--for one of the most disturbing instances of this that I've read, see Deirdre McCloskey's Crossing: A Memoir).

Instead, Craigie recommends looking into the quality of the reasoning by which the patient forms the value or preference that leads to the treatment refusal. She considers several approaches of evaluating the process by which the patient comes to a particular conclusion rather than simply judging the decision itself, or the value or preference that led to it. I was gratified to see this approach, because that is what I argue in much of my work on paternalism and welfarism: assuming that paternalism is justified in cases of involuntary behavior, involuntariness must be assessed procedurally--based on how the individual came to "act" in a certain way--rather than judging the value, prudence, or wisdom of the act itself. Whatever external evalutors think of an action is irrelevant--all that matters is how she came to that decision, and if she acted voluntarily.

Craigie argues that there is some evidence--though perhaps not enough at this point--to suggest that anorexics form their overwhelming desires for thinness in ways that compromise their true autonomy, and compares this case to Jehovah's Witness who refuses blood transfusions, in which case she recognizes that the religious value leading to that decision may be a core value of the individual, and is therefore less questionable. This is in line with what I have argued elsewhere (including chapter 5 of Kantian Ethics and Economics), we should assume that individuals make decisions in their own interests, as complex and multifaceted as they are, and interference with them is only justified if there is evidence that a decision (or action) was not made (or taken) voluntarily. (And yes, I realize that voluntariness is a topic of discussion all in itself, but I think the point stands even without specifying it further.) Refusal of medical treatment is  fantastic application of this, and I am very happy Craigie raised these issues.

Conference: The Impact of Hinduism on the Economy and Business Management

Mark D. White

Upcoming at Fordham University...

Conference on the Impact of Hinduism on the Economy and Business Management

“HINDUTVA PRINCIPLE OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT”
Subramanian Swamy
President Janata Party, former Harvard Economics Faculty,
IIT Delhi, Minister of Commerce, Finance, Law, and Justice

“HINDU SOCIAL CORPORATE FORM AND SRENI DHARMA: CURE FOR GREED”
Srinivasan Kalyanaraman
Chennai, India, Former Senior Executive, Asian Development Bank

“INDIA’S ENTREPRENEURSHIP-CASTE AS SOCIAL CAPITAL”
R. Vaidyanathan
Indian Institute of Technology, Bangalore

Mr. John Tognino, Chair, Fordham University Board of Trustees, will inaugurate the conference.

Sponsored by the Economics Department, International Political Economy & Dev’t (IPED), Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), Fordham University; Vijaydev Mistry Foundation, and Twaalfhoven Family Foundation.

Reception follows the conference. To reserve your seat, register for free at http://www.fordham.edu/religionbusiness.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. Hrishikesh D. Vinod
Economics Dept
Fordham University, Bronx,NY
Tel. 718-817-4065
vinod@fordham.edu

Ethics and Religion: Special issue of Philosophical Investigations

Mark D. White

The latest issue of Philosophical Investigations (34/2, April 2011) is a special issue on ethics and religion, containing the following papers:

Timothy Chappell, "Glory as an Ethical Idea"

There is a gap between what we think and what we think we think about ethics. This gap appears when elements of our ethical reflection and our moral theories contradict each other. It also appears when something that is important in our ethical reflection is sidelined in our moral theories. The gap appears in both ways with the ethical idea glory. The present exploration of this idea is a case study of how far actual ethical reflection diverges from moral theory. This divergence tells against moral theory, and in favour of less constricted and more flexible modes of ethical reflection.

Lenn E. Goldman, "Ethics and God"

Philosophers like to speak of a “Euthyphro Dilemma” pitting divine fiat against a moral realism that soon fades to personal or social preferences. But Plato targets no such dilemma. The Euthyphro hints a complementarity of divine commands with human moral insights. Values are constitutive in ideas of divinity, and monotheism affirms only goodness in God. So, pace James Rachels, worship is not surrender of autonomy, as Saadiah and Maimonides' biblical and rabbinic ethics reveal. Chimneying more fairly models the dialectic of religion with ethics than does the contrived conflict between putatively arbitrary divine commands and presumptively self-certifying human moral creativity.

John E. Hare, "Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments"

This paper describes and defends two arguments connecting ethics and religion that Kant makes in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The first argument is that the moral demand is too high for us in our natural capacities, and God's assistance is required to bridge the resulting moral gap. The second argument is that because humans desire to be happy as well as to be morally good, morality will be rationally unstable without belief in a God who can bring happiness and virtue together. The paper states and replies to three objections to each argument.

Michael McGhee, "Is Nothing Sacred? A Secular Philosophy of Incarnation"

Christian thinkers have recently expressed concern about the “silencing” or marginalisation of religion in public life, have affirmed the desirability of dialogue between the world of faith and the world of reason but have raised doubts about the feasibility of a moral language that refers to unconditional moral claims or human rights or the intrinsic dignity of human beings if it is not grounded in a transcendent or supernatural source of value. The present paper is an attempt to open a conversation about these themes from the point of view of a non-theistic humanism inspired by a notion of incarnation.

David S. Oderberg, "Morality, Religion, and Cosmic Justice"

I argue for a connection between morality and religion on the basis of a need for cosmic justice – a comprehensive system of rewards and punishments for good and bad behaviour, respectively. I set out the Argument for Cosmic Justice, discussing the nature of reward and punishment and how they differ from mere benefit and loss. A world without cosmic justice would be absurd and unacceptable to anyone who takes morality seriously in the way identified by George Mavrodes. I also consider a number of objections to the argument.

John Rist, "Morality and Religion: Some Questions about First Principles"

Challenged by moral nihilism we have three options: some sort of “Protagorean” conventionalism, a transcendentally rooted version of “naturalism” originally identified by Plato and fleshed out by Augustine, and a “virtual” morality cynically marketed as objective. Conventionalism, however, fails to ground obligation, which could thus be justified only by “Augustine's” alternative, which he developed from its original in three ways: by proposing a personal first principle, thus emphasising respect for every individual; by deepening our awareness of evil in reinforcing the notion of “crime” by that of “sin” against the nature and consequent commands of a personal God; and by locating us in no timeless sphere of pure rationality but in our particular historical space. Religion (so understood) and moral obligation stand or fall together.

A Moral Sentiments Perspective on Health Care

Jonathan B. Wight

Mark raised an important question, “Does health care have special moral status?”  Mark answers in the negative, using strong intellectual arguments.  These arguments are not wrong but I suggest here they are incomplete because they fail to consider important aspects of human nature.

There is a moral sentiments argument for health care that is plainly made by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (III-3.4):

Smith starts with the famous line: “Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake…” 

Smith says that a person of great humanity in Europe would care very little about this calamity if he were far removed from the suffering.  Hence:  “If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw [those suffering], he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren….” 

But Smith goes on to show that if offered the choice of sacrificing a finger to save those hundred million Chinese, the moral imagination swings actively into gear.  “Human nature startles with horror at the thought,” that if we could easily prevent suffering, that we would sit by and do nothing. 

Hence: “When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?” (emphasis added).

The bottom line is: The obvious lack of health care in some citizens, when it is widely viewed as resulting in pain that could be easily prevented or ameliorated, produces emotional shock that leads to active engagement to address the problem.  The same is not true for most other products. 

Example:  Let’s consider the case of last summer’s Copiapó mining accident in Chile. A purely intellectual analysis might conclude that Chileans (and others from all over the world) should not have devoted all those massive resources to saving the lives of the 33 trapped miners nearly a half-mile underground.  The miners understood the risks of taking the job, and were presumably paid a premium for that risk. 

Using cost-benefit analysis, one could show fairly easily that the money used to save these miners could save far more life-years used elsewhere.  Yet the reason the miners were saved is because the moral imagination was aroused.  This can be inefficient (it certainly is) and unjust (it likely is)—but it is an integral part of human nature. 

Hence, the pure libertarian view fails to consider the “externality” effect that pain causes on other citizens.  A pure libertarian might say, “Let them suffer—they made their own choices.”  But that runs counter to human biology (our mirror neuron system) as well as to religious injunctions (see the parable of the prodigal son).  Health care really is different because of the moral sentiments it arouses.

Christmas, Religion, and a New God

Jonathan B. Wight

It’s Christmas Day, and snow is falling gently in Richmond, Virginia.  Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus—if shopping malls are any indication.

Santa rules, but is there a God?  This is the subject of John Shelby Spong’s latest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell (2010).  Spong is the controversial Episcopal bishop and prolific author who argued in previous books that Christianity had to modernize or die. Religion’s dogmas are deadening because they conflict with science and current common sense.  “One cannot restore life by doing a facelift on a corpse,” he wrote, in one of the memorable lines (p. 142). 

This isn’t particularly new; what is new is that an Episcopal bishop (now retired) is writing this.  Spong is speaking tomorrow in Richmond at my church—and the church he previously led—historic St. Paul’s Episcopal.  This is the church where, according to local legend, Robert E. Lee set the tone for the post-Civil War society by kneeling alongside a black man at the altar to receive communion. 

Spong is also willing to break with the past to forge a new direction for understanding religion and ethics.  Spong’s conclusion is that there is no God, at least not one of heaven and hell.  Rather, we must understand God (or love) as an internal link with the evolving consciousness of humanity.  This conclusion ends up being startlingly similar to Teilhard de Chardin’s thesis in his remarkable work, The Phenomenon of Man (1955). 

One is reminded of Adam Smith’s doctrine that belief in an afterlife is required if people are to develop self control needed for justice.  Is that an outdated notion?  Will humanity outgrow needing the threat of an afterlife (whether in Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism), by adopting a new universal consciousness?

Merry Christmas and happy dreams for the future…

2011 ASSA Meetings: Economics and religion sessions

Mark D. White

Going through the preliminary program for the upcoming Allied Social Science Association meetings in Denver in early January, I decided to highlight sessions that I found interesting for one reason or another. (See this previous post for sessions that focus on economics and ethics.)

Below the fold are several sessions that touch on economics and religion (as before, I've omitted the names of chairs and discussants, which can found on the program):