Moral Science and Moral Imagination
The question of the status of economics as a science and what type of science it may be has been a part of the internet debating cycles for as long as I can remember. One of the sticking points in these unceasing debates is if economics is value-free with most of the progressive and heterodox critics agreeing that economics must embrace some form of value-ladeness and that its practitioners must be educated in the practices necessary to identify the value commitments internal to their methodological choices. In that same vein, I will identify my own value commitments so that there is no confusion or subterfuge in this post: Economics, if it is to be anything, must be a moral science. What is a moral science? Historically, the moral sciences were those studies that stood opposed to the physical sciences: language opposed to geography. The moral sciences involved the study of all that made humans, well, human. A distinction between classical moral sciences and current social science em