This open access book examines from a variety of perspectives the disappearance of moral content and ethical judgment from the models employed in the formulation of modern economic theory, and some of the papers contain important proposals about how moral judgment could be reintroduced in economic theory. The chapters collected in this volume result from the favorable reception of the first volume of the Virtues in Economics series and represent further contributions to the themes set out in that volume: (i) examining the philosophical and methodological fallacies of this turn in modern economic theory that the removal of the moral motivation of economic agents from modern economic theory has entailed; and (ii) proposing a return descriptive economics as the means with which the moral content of economic life could be restored in economic theory.
This book is of interest to researchers and students of the methodology of economics, ethics, philosophers concerned with agency and economists who build economic models that rest in the intention of the agent.
Peter Róna is Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, where he teaches courses in economics and the philosophical foundations of the social sciences. He obtained his B.A. degree in economic history (cum laude) from the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree from Oxford University (First Class) in 1964. He was an associate of the Washington, D.C, law firm, Arnold & Porter and counsel to the US Department of Commerce before becoming the personal assistant of Lord Richardson, Governor of the Bank of England. He joined the Schroder Group in 1969 as the General Counsel of its operations in the United Sates, and became the President and Chief Executive of the IBJ Schroder Bank & Trust co. in 1985. In 2003 he joined the faculty of Eötvös Lóránd University where he taught public international law and in 2006 he was made an Honorary Professor there. His published articles include a study of the Euro and an examination of the philosophical foundations of economics.
Laszlo Zsolnai is professor and director of the Business Ethics Center at the Corvinus University of Budapest. He is president of the European SPES Institute in Leuven, Belgium and Co-chair of the Future Earth Finance & Economics Knowledge and Action Network in Montreal. Laszlo Zsolnai’s recent books include The Palgrave Handbook of Spirituality and Business (2011. Houndmills, UK, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan), Beyond Self: Ethical and Spiritual Dimensions of Economics (2014. Peter Lang Academic Publishers, Oxford), The Spiritual Dimension of Business Ethics and Sustainability Management (2015, Springer), Post-Materialistic Business: Spiritual Value-Orientation in Renewing Management (2015, Palgrave) and Ethical Leadership. Indian and European Spiritual Approaches (2016, Palgrave-Macmillan).
Agnieszka Wincewicz-Price – head of Behavioural Economics Unit at the Polish Economic Institute in Warsaw(Poland). Graduate of Warsaw School of Economics, Erasmus Universiteit in Rotterdam (EIPE) and Newcastle University where she received her PhD in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research interests are economic and political philosophy, economic methodology and history of economic thought. Her current work focuses on the problems of preference formation and change, rational choice theory and philosophy of economic agency. She studies how these issues are treated in behavioural economics and – most recently - its practical application in the politics of nudging. She is the economics editor of a peer-reviewed journal Politics & Poetics. Member of the Polish Philosophy of Economics Network.
