Economist and theologian Paul Heyne once asked the question, “Are economists basically immoral?” He asked this because economists have a frustrating tendency to interrupt the high moral aspirations of others with complications about how, in the real world, life is not so simple. When other people are concerned with social justice and love, they have a knack for focusing on things like costs and logistics, seemingly putting a price on doing the right thing. Is this just an annoying habit of a small subset of social scientists, or might it be a moral calling? It is common today, especially among economists, to conceive of economic science as “value-free” in a fairly radical sense. Often this conception is credited to Milton Friedman, who wrote in a 1953 article, “Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments.”

To be fair to Friedman, in the same article he admits there is a place for normative or morally-informed economics. But his characterization of positive economics has become a standard way of understanding economics as a whole. Economists just run the numbers. What people do with them is up to them and their own value systems. Conversely, some people maintain the opposite, insisting that economics is not and cannot be value-free at all. In Christian circles, this is a common stance among social justice activists, distributists and so-called “radical orthodox” thinkers, though it is not limited to them. The basic idea is that the discipline of economics assumes a whole anthropology and ethics, whether or not economists admit it. As such, it should not be considered a science and should not have any independence from ethics at all. Economist Wilhelm Röpke characterized this perspective, which he rejected, as “heteronomous” in a 1942 article because it denies the autonomy of economic science in favor of subsuming it under ethics or philosophy, i.e. under a different rule (hetero + nomos) than its own.

We live in a world of right and wrong, and we all have views about morality that cannot be debunked by any amount of statistical analysis or conceptual modeling. In his essay “Economics and Ethics,” Heyne said, “Scientific knowledge grows by testing, but it is scientists who do the testing, not ‘objective reality.’” All reality has a subjective, and thus value-laden, aspect to it. Scientists, and thus also economists, are people too, and they cannot escape the moral aspect of their nature. Can this debate be settled? Is there some other way that we could conceive the relationship between ethics and economics? I think there is, and I’m not the only one. As I’ve already noted, Friedman was not a strict positivist, and Paul Heyne certainly was not a heteronomist. In fact, from its very beginnings, modern economics, then called political economy, was understood to be both moral and autonomous, combining “value-free” empirical observation with ethical, social and political concerns in a way that no other science could.

Read the article “ANALYSIS: Is Economics Amoral?” on acton.org.