IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-28189-0_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Defining Evil in an Economic Way

In: Economics and Social Conflict

Author

Listed:
  • Carl D. Mildenberger

Abstract

It is interesting that philosophy and psychology talk about evil while economics does not. To my knowledge, there exists no single economic work that explicitly uses the concept of evil in order to describe or explain human behavior. This complete non-consideration of evil behavior by economists is, to say the least, surprising. Given the long intellectual history of the concepts of moral and natural evil, it is surprising that there is no significant impact of these concepts in economics. Even more so as only recently economists started to talk about the normatively opposed concepts of altruism, fairness, and reciprocity (for example, Camerer, 2003; Fehr & Schmidt, 1999; Kagel & Roth, 1995). And Lorenz (1963/1998) finds that, from a biological and evolutionary background, ‘evil’ in the form of aggression is indispensable for the evolution of close-knit groups, trust, and cooperation. He says that in nature, we do not find love or friendship without aggression, because the former evolved as an evolutionary countermeasure to the latter. So where is the idea of evil in economics?

Suggested Citation

  • Carl D. Mildenberger, 2013. "Defining Evil in an Economic Way," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Economics and Social Conflict, chapter 3, pages 34-76, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-28189-0_3
    DOI: 10.1057/9781137281890_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-28189-0_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.