Mark D. White

Because he's too bashful to tell you, I'll tell you that Jonathan Wight's 2014 Presidential Address for the Association for Social Economics, delivered at January's ASSA meetings, has just been published in the Review of Social Economy, and the link has been posted to the ASE blog.

The title is "Economics within a Pluralist Ethical Tradition":

Ethical pluralism is the recognition that multiple ethical frameworks operate in social settings to solve problems of moral hazard. In particular, non-consequentialist considerations of duty and virtue operate to restrain self-interest and lower transaction costs in exchange, such as when asymmetric information exists. Positive economics has tended to rely exclusively on a behavioral model that assumes utility maximization, but this approach fails to give credit to the neglected foundations of duty and virtue. Consequences, duties, and virtues all play a role in sustaining businesses, for example, and in promoting the search for truth within the economic research community. Normative welfare economics can also benefit from understanding vertical and horizontal pluralism.