Moral Sensibilities for the Social Economy: The Challenges Facing Social Economists in the Twenty-first Century—A Philosopher’s Perpective

Social economists are those minority of the profession who persist in holding with Aristotle and Adam Smith, among others, that economics is fundamentally moral philosophy. They are well aware that to define economics as a science of pure means, as L. Robbins and the mainstream of the discipline along with him have done, is to debase the discipline into a mere handmaiden of power-politics left free to set its own ends, and while the mainstream persists in trying to separate facts from values, social economists realize that such cannot be done completely, because all factual claims assume at least the value of truthfulnes and the selection of what facts are deemed relevant entails value assumptions. The task before the social economist, in attempting to dislodge the deeply entrenched philosophical assumptions of the dominant theories, is a herculean one, as I indicated in an earlier article in the Review of Social Economy: The overthrow of classical economics requires nothing less than the overthrow o the metaphysics of Newtonian mechanics, the epistemology of British empiricism, the Hobbesian philosophy of the human, utilitarian ethics, classical liberal social theory, and the Deistic theology of the "invisible hand." All this must be replaced by a new metaphysics, a new epistemology, a new philosophical anthropology, a new ethics, a new theory of community, and a new theology, and all these new theories must be well integrated into a comprehensive world-view. What needs to be done in order once again to think economics within the context of moral philosophy? As a philosopher looking at the future of social economics I wish to identify what I take to be the very deepest assumptions, or what philosophers term the "ontology," underlying the edifice of conventional economics. I wish to focus on two fundamental attitudes, or sensibilities, toward the world, toward reality itself, that need to be dislodged and transformed in order to reconnect economics and ethics. Abstractionism Social economists need to wage relentless war against abstractionism in the discipline. By "abstractionism" I do not mean the healthy, productive use of abstract concepts, or even abstract thinking in general, but that perversion of abstract reasoning that somehow has lost touch with the concrete, human experience from which it grew. Two aspects of abstractionism I especially want to identify. First, symbols are taken as "more real" than what they signify. Examples of such confusion abound in our present-day thinking: patriotic zealot take the flag to be more fundamental than the ideals it represents and thus sacrifice the latter to protect the former; students take their grades as the essence of their education; policy analysts take gross national product figures as constituting the real wealth and well-being of a nation; corporate accountants equate large net profits with a healthy enterprise. In every one of these instances abstractionism produces and conceals seriously harmful social consequences. A second feature of abstractionism is that it is reductionistic: viz., all reality tends to get reduced to some a priori set of conceptual categories, all experience is forced into them, and what does not fit is conveniently ignored. Some common reductionisms of the human person are the following: "a person is nothing more than a bunch of chemicals"; "a person is nothing more than a complex machine"; "a person is nothing more than a highly evolved animal"; "a person is nothing more than an utility maximizer." It is this "nothing more than" that surely marks the extreme examples of reductionism. Such extremes are perhaps straw men, but I do believe, however, that they remind us of some actua reductionist tendencies with which we are all familiar. Reductionist tendencies in economics are epitomized by the very notion of homo economicus, viz., an abstraction that reduces persons to economic functions, viz., utility maximizers. …