By Mark D. White

In the latest issue of Economics and Philosophy (37/3, November 2021), Elizabeth Brake (Rice University) examines one of the most controversial topics in the ethical analysis of market behavior. In her article "Price Gouging and the Duty of Easy Rescue," Brake surveys the standard economic and ethical arguments for and against the practice, and suggests a novel ethical argument against it: that it violates our obligation to help people in emergency situations when it is of little cost to us. This position is usually associated with utilitarianism, thanks to Peter Singer, but can also be derived from various forms of deontology (although the positive nature of the duty may demand an extra step) as well as virtue ethics.

Brake makes a legal case as well as an ethical one, arguing that there is a basis in law for enforcement of a duty of easy rescue in such cases where price gouging arises. As she acknowledges, this is a more difficult case to make, because a legal duty normally implies a right that is violated, and a legal right to assistance is not generally recognized, however dire one's circumstances. She suggests several alternative ways of justifying a limited prohibition of price gouging based on legal duty of easy rescue, such as considering it as part of the regulation of market activity in the public interest, in which businesses are prohibited from harmful practices.

There is much more in Brake's paper than I can discuss here and it rewards a careful reading. For instance, she does address the economic benefits of price gouging, such as increasing supply of much-needed goods to disaster-stricken areas, and her ethical and legal analysis does allow for price increases to cover legitimate costs and risk. Her argument is against "pure" profiteering only, claiming that the seller's interest in higher profit does not justify holding disaster victim's interest in survival hostage to negotiations over price. Related to this, Brake also notes that market conditions are far from ideal in disasters, so we should not assume the same quality of consent, or use the same standards of coercion or duress, when evaluating transactions offered or made in such a context.

(For more of Brake's work on disaster ethics, see the dedicated page at her website.)

By Jonathan B. Wight

Conference Dates: October 21-22, 2021

Virtual Conference

LSBU Business School
&
London Centre for Business and Entrepreneurship Research

During the last 30 years, the conversation between economic theory and ethics has been restarted, after a period of interruption, generated by the positivist era in economics. We cannot ignore, in this revival, the role of the financial crisis, gender and racial inequality and now the divisions revealed by the unequal impacts of the pandemic. An important contribution has been the call for a professional economic ethics led by DeMartino (2011) and DeMartino and McCloskey (2016).

More recently, Dolfsma and Negru (2019) challenge the idea that ethics has no place in economics. Building on their ideas we ask: Is ethics important for the study of the economy and, if so, how should it be taught?

This two day conference will be of interest to lecturers and students in economics and business - and anyone with an interest in the future of the economics curriculum.

Link for the event & registration: 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/teaching-ethics-to-economists-challenges-benefits-tickets-170298187463 


Programme

Day One: Thursday 21 October

9.45am - Virtual housekeeping & Zoom functionality - Neil Hudson-Basing, Corporate Events Manager, LSBU

9.55am - Welcome - Craig Duckworth, LSBU Business School, UK

10am - Introduction to the day. Economics and Ethics - what is the agenda?

• Ioana Negru, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania
• Imko Meyenberg, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
• Craig Duckworth, LSBU Business School, UK

10.30am - Revisiting the analytical relationship of Ethics and Economics - María Isabel Encinar & Félix-Fernando Muñoz, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

11.15am - Theoretical and ethical reductionism and the neglect of subjectivity in economics and economic education - Giancarlo Ianulardo, University of Exeter, UK

12pm - Lunch break

12.30pm - Keeping alive non-individualistic ethics in political economy: a review of concepts from Aquinas to Habermas - Stefano Solari, University of Padua, Italy

1.15pm - Racism, the economy and ethics: where does it all begin? - Paolo Ramazzotti, University of Macerata, Italy

2pm - Teaching economic harm to economists - George DeMartino, University of Denver, USA

2.45pm - Comfort break

3pm - The fate of moral philosophy in the age of economic scientism: ethics and welfare economics in mainline economics - Peter Boettke, George Mason University, USA

3.45pm - Plenary: Reflections

4pm - End of Day One

______________________________________________________________________

Day Two: Friday 22 October

9.45am - Virtual housekeeping & Zoom functionality - Neil Hudson-Basing, Corporate Events Manager, LSBU

9.55am - Welcome and intro to Day Two - Craig Duckworth, LSBU Business School, UK

10am - Managerial decision making: consequences and Consequentialism - Malcolm Brady & Marta Rocchi, Dublin City University, Ireland

10.45am - Economic curricular, pluralism and the Global South - Michelle Groenewald, North- West University, South Africa

11.30am - Accounting as applied ethics: teaching a discipline - Wilfred Dolfsma, Wageningen University, Netherlands

12.15pm - Lunch break

12.45pm - Purusharthas: the human pursuit of wealth and welfare. The Indian approach to ethics and economics - V P Raghavan, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, India

1.30pm - Economics, ethics and deliberation

• Ioana Negru, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania
• Imko Meyenberg, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
• Craig Duckworth, LSBU Business School, UK

2.15pm - The kidney market debate: a retrospective on Becker and Elias - Jonathan Wight, University of Richmond, USA

3pm - Comfort break

3.15pm - Alfred North Whitehead on the education of the commercial class: its influence on Keynes - Dennis Badeen, University of Hertfordshire, UK

4pm - Plenary: Reflections

4.15pm - End of Conference

*Times according to GMT

________________________________________________________________________________________________

This conference will be delivered virtually via Zoom. You will receive the joining instructions on the Monday before the event takes place.

By Mark D. White

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project recently launched a symposium that promises to examine cost-benefit analysis (CBA) under the critical lens of political science, law, and philosophy. The introductory post by legal scholar Frank Pasquale can be found here, and after surveying a number of the issues with CBA, summarizes the symposium's intent and future participants in its final paragraph:

The challenge to CBA is now clear. If it is to be a tool of policy evaluation worth supporting, we must embed it in political frameworks that make CBA just as prone to catalyzing regulation, as to derailing it. Moreover, the limits of quantification must be squarely addressed. Posts in this symposium demonstrate a way forward on both fronts, enriching CBA with both immanent and transcendent critiques of past OIRA missteps. We will be thrilled to welcome the symposiasts over the coming weeks: Beth Popp Berman, James Goodwin, Lisa Heinzerling, Zachary Liscow, Melissa Luttrell, Jorge Romano-Romero, Mark Silverman, Amy Sinden, and Karen Tani. Each has done important work in the field, and LPE Blog is honored to host their contributions.

The first full post, by legal scholar Lisa Heinzerling, discusses CBA in the context of the dual concerns of racial justice and climate change. She asks whether CBA can adequately appreciate the true benefits of action on these fronts, given its reliance on discounting of future benefits (which is highly sensitive to the specific discount rate chosen) and monetary valuation of benefits (which does not apply well to issues involving dignity and rights). She concludes by suggesting an alternative evaluative approach to these policy issues:

Discounting and monetary valuation are so central to the cost-benefit method that it is hard to imagine cost-benefit analysis without them. Happily, though, it is easy to imagine White House regulatory review without cost-benefit analysis. The vast majority of federal regulatory statutes do not require cost-benefit analysis. Many do not even allow it. Instead of evaluating major rules by asking whether they satisfy the test of formal cost-benefit analysis, the White House could ask whether the rules faithfully follow the relevant statutory framework and whether the agencies have rigorously analyzed the evidence in front of them. This simple reform would not only avoid the conundrums posed by cost-benefit analysis. It would also close the gap that has opened between the regulatory standards set by Congress and the cost-benefit metric that recent presidents have preferred.

This symposium is shaping up to be a valuable and fascinating survey of the numerous moral, legal, and political issues with cost-benefit analysis, and we'll likely be highlighting more contributions here as it continues.

“PRIZES AND VIRTUES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKSHOP”
LUMSA University, Rome – April 10-11, 2017

To an economist, a prize, such as a golden medal, is merely a special type of incentive. Any other kind of social scientist would be perplexed by thinking of the Nobel Prize, or of the Medal of Honour, in these terms. In contemporary neoclassical economics, the concept of incentive is a primitive, similar to that of “utility”, “price”, “production” or “consumption”, that all economists use but none feels the need to define: it is a foundation, or a corner stone, of the science of economics. However, if we tried to articulate what economists mean by incentives, we would probably find that they are considered as any “motivation” for adhering to and for complying with some form of contract. Once incentives are intended in this all-embracing way, it immediately follows that prizes and awards are considered simply as their sub-set. Yet many real world prizes and awards do not follow this contractarian, consequentialist logic and cannot be understood within this framework. A more complex understanding of human motivation–we believe–is needed to hold that prizes are indeed not incentives.

This search cannot ignore the history of economic and philosophical ideals. Competing theories of action and motivation were central topics of debate among eighteenth century philosophers. David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith’s theories implied much more complex social and economic motivations than mere self-interest, which can be opportunely diverted through an appropriate incentive. Within the Italian school of civil economy, Pietro Verri and Antonio Genovesi elaborated on the unintended consequences of public and institutional actions on individuals’ behaviour. In the same line, Giacinto Dragonetti debated (at a distance) with Cesare Beccaria on the nature and effectiveness of punishments and awards in shaping agents’ choices, both in private and public contexts. From the mid XIX century onward, economists became those social scientists most characterized by the purest anthropology (i.e. that of a human being acting in order to maximize individual utili!
 ty), endorsing utilitarian philosophy and sacrificing previously complex understanding of human actions. In the XX century, microeconomics has continued this process of anthropological reductionism: management theory, as well as agency and contract theory, have distilled the all-embracing theory of incentives.

In the last three decades, behavioural and experimental economics are undermining from within this reductionist model of human behaviour. By taking serious account of concepts such as reciprocity, intrinsic motivation, inequality aversion, and fairness, they are making more complex interpretations of human action and motivation central again, albeit still within the utilitarian framework. In addition, there is an important contemporary philosophical stream of inquiry, the so-called virtue ethics, which competes with utilitarianism yet remains almost unknown to the economic profession. We argue that this research may provide further insights into human action, which seem otherwise intractable within the current anthropological framework, and can cast a new light on the nature and working of prizes as fundamentally different from incentives. In particular, prizes may well suit the rewarding of virtues, because incentive are known to be liable to cause motivation crowding-out.

To advance our understanding of the economics of prizes, awards and their link with virtues,we warmly invite economists, historians, philosophers, scholars in organization and management and other social scientists to answer to this call and submit an extended abstract (max 1000 words).

Keynote speakers:
– Robert Dur, Erasmus University Rotterdam (Economics)
– Bruno Frey, University of Basel (Behavioural Science)
– Ruth Grant, Duke University (Political Science)

“Pier Luigi Porta” Award:
Heirs will honour the memory of the past Heirs’ President Professor Pier Luigi Porta by a special award to the best paper presented at this conference, a stream of research strongly supported by him before dying. Heirs invites all under fourty scholars to apply for this special “Pier Luigi Porta Award”. The award consist in 2500 euro plus travel cost and accomodation for the conference. The prize will be assigned during the social dinner.

Deadline for submissions of extended abstracts (max 1000 words):
February 15th, 2017 (acceptance date: February 25th, 2017)
to: [email protected]

Organization committee: HEIRS & LUMSA University
Luigino Bruni (LUMSA), Vittorio Pelligra (U. Cagliari), Tommaso Reggiani (LUMSA),     Matteo Rizzolli (LUMSA), Alessandra Smerilli (LUMSA).

Contacts:
[email protected]

Mark D. White

Upon generous invitation, earlier this month I helped launch a conversation at Cato Unbound regarding whether or to what extent Immanuel Kant can or should be regarded as a classical liberal.

The entire discussion can be found here, starting with my lead article in defense of Kant as a classical liberal, followed by critical responses from Gregory Salmieri, Stephen R. C. Hicks, and Roderick T. Long, followed by my response to all three comments and further discussion (still continuing through the end of the month.

By Jonathan B. Wight

Last February I attending an outstanding seminar in Washington DC on ethics and economics, hosted by AIRLEAP (the nonprofit Association for Integrity and Responsible Leadership in Economics and Associated Professions). 

Upcoming next January is another seminar in conjunction with the ASSA meetings in Chicago.  Below are the details.

********************************

A special seminar will be held in Chicago on January 8, 2017:

“Principles of Ethics, Scientific Integrity, and Responsible Leadership:

A One-Day Training Seminar for Economists.”

When the same seminar was held this past February in Washington D.C. it was endorsed by the Eastern Economic Association and by the National Economists Club, and it received highly favorable reviews. Several organizations sent their employees to the seminar to meet their employee’s annual training requirements in leadership and ethics, and seminar attendees receive a certificate of expertise. Many graduate students attended as well, and the seminar includes a specific presentation offering advice to students on the job market. The seminar provides a wide range of insightful presentations by world-renowned experts, and will engage the audience in provocative and interactive discussions about some of the most challenging issues in economics today.

The seminar this coming January is being held at the magnificent Chicago Cultural Center. Some of the distinguished speakers include:

• D. McCloskey, & G. DeMartino, Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics;
• Agency Leaders: Erica Groshen (BLS), Keith Hall (CBO), and Brian Moyer (BEA);
• D. Colander, author of The Making of an Economist, and many other economics books;
• S. Ziliak, The Cult of Statistical Significance (with D. McCloskey);
• R,G. Anderson, former Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The fee for the full-day seminar is set at a minimum to cover costs: $95, or $50 for students.

To learn more about the seminar and to register for it people should go to http://tinyurl.com/AIRLEAP2017.\

Thank you for your consideration, and thank you in advance for distributing this announcement.

With best wishes,

Board of Directors of the Association for Integrity and Responsible Leadership in Economics: Deirdre McCloskey (Chair), Richard G. Anderson, Amelie Constant, Mark Costa, George DeMartino, Seth Giertz, Areerat Kichkha, Steven Payson, W. Charles Sawyer, and Stephen Ziliak

The Rev. B. P. Campbell

[In this sermon Ben explores the dark side of individualism, isolation, and fragmentation—the unnecessary consequences of economic growth—in the aftermath of the tragedies in Dallas, St. Paul, Baton Rouge, and other cities last week.  --JW]

Reference: The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)

----------------------------

"Now in the 21st century, as the mobility and disloyalty of money take over, we are slipping into greater fragmentation.  Too many ditches.  Too many robbers.  Too little community.  Too much despair."

----------------------------

            Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

            Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.
He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

            Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

            This week, maybe this year, we’ve all been living on the Jericho Road.

            We’ve built a nation of Jericho Roads.

            Where is the Good Samaritan?

            It’s as if we were living right in the middle of the story which Jesus told the lawyer.  “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  “What have you been taught?”  Jesus asks.  The man gives the right answer – Love God and your neighbor.  But then he asks another question.  It is on this question, and Jesus’ answer to it, that God’s Holy Spirit builds the kingdom of God.

            “Who is my neighbor,” the man asks.

            Jesus’ answer is a story – a story that breaks the rules of religion and sets men and women free – a story whose basic commandment is to Live, to Live imaginatively, to tackle the issues that present themselves today without prescription or instruction – only the instruction to love our neighbor as ourselves.

            This week, maybe this year, we’ve all been living on the Jericho Road.

            We’ve built a nation of Jericho Roads.

            Where is the Good Samaritan?

Mark D. White

Our readers may be interested to know about a new book coming out soon from Oxford University Press that I co-edited with Jennifer A. Baker entitled Economics and the Virtues: Building a New Moral Foundation. From the blurb:

While ethics has been an integral part of economics since the days of Adam Smith (if not Aristotle), many modern economists dismiss ethical concerns in favor of increasing formal mathematical and computational methods. But recent financial crises in the real world have reignited discussions of the importance of ethics to economics, including growing calls for a new approach to incorporating moral philosophy in economic theory, practice, and policy. Ironically, it is the ethics of virtue advocated by Aristotle and Adam Smith that may lead to the most promising way to developing an economics that emphasizes the virtues, character, and judgment of the agents it models.

In Economics and the Virtues, editors Jennifer A. Baker and Mark D. White have brought together fifteen leading scholars in economics and philosophy to offer fresh perspectives on integrating virtue into economics. The first section covers five major thinkers and schools in the virtue tradition, tracing historical connections and suggesting new areas of cooperation. The second section applies the ethics of virtue to modern economic theory, delving into its current practices and methodology to suggest areas for integration with moral philosophy. Finally, the third section addresses specific topics such as markets, profits, and justice in the context of virtue and vice, offering valuable applications of virtue to economics.

With insights that are novel as well as rooted in time-tested ethical thought, Economics and the Virtues will be of interest to economists, philosophers, and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities, as well as professionals and policymakers in the fields of economics and finance, and makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing discussion over the role of ethics in economics.

Many if not all of the contributors will be familiar names: besides me and Jennifer, they include Christian U. Becker, Tim O'Keefe, James Otteson, Michael Baurmann and Geoffrey Brennan, Eric Schliesser, Andrew Yuengert, Christine Swanton, David C. Rose, Seung (Ginny) Choi and Virgil Storr, and Jason Brennan. (You can see the complete table of contents at Amazon, OUP, or my personal blog.)

Personally, this book has been a dream of mine for a number of years, and working with Jennifer, Adam Swallow and (the late) Terry Vaughn at OUP, and all the contributors, made that dream a reality in every possible way.

Economics and the Virtues has already been reviewed by Adam Gurri at Sweet Talk, where he calls it "a valuable source of insight, especially for economists used to operating within only one framework." Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center and The Economist calls it "a fascinating volume" and "an indispensable collection for anyone interested in moral psychology, economic theory, or the morality of markets," and pre-eminent philosopher and Kant scholar Onora O'Neill calls it "a rich and rewarding collection" that "explores classical accounts of the virtues, and argues that they remain essential not only to character but to culture, including the culture of markets."

(You can also see Jennifer's and my post at OUPblog discussing "The Big Short" in relation to the theme of the book.)

Mark D. White

Thanks to Cass Sunstein for spotlighting this on Twitter: the December 2015 issue of Current Opinion in Psychology has a number of short survey articles on the state of moral psychology and behavioral ethics, and seems for the time being to be free to read. The table of contents is here, and the following is from the editors' introduction:

Jonathan B. Wight

Mark White calls attention to a Wall Street Journal review of Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help (2015) by Larissa MacFarquhar.

What happens when people have an almost pathological urge to help others? The people described in this book undertake “extreme ethical commitments”—such as adopting 20 children, undertaking a dangerous political protest despite having a young son, and refusing to wash dishes because this takes time away from environmental activism.

This last example is  juvenile, and reminds me of the humorous claim made about Gandhi: “You will never know how much it costs us to keep that saint, that wonderful old man, in poverty!”

The implication is clear—the supposed saintly one who extols benevolence toward others often does not fulfill the most basic moral virtue of prudence—taking appropriate regard for one’s own life and responsibilities. One has a duty to oneself as well as to others.

A virtue ethicist would say we need balance. It is fine to be generous and altruistic toward others, but not if that makes you the ward of the state or a burden on others. Some of the people described in this book seem to lack that balance, and that would not be virtuous, regardless of the motive for helping or the focus on others.