Ethics in economics - not ethics and economics: Guidance for researchers

This paper, originally a presentation at the 2024 World Congress of Social Economics Summer School at University of Massachusetts-Boston, discusses how ethical values can be incorporated in empirical research. It identifies mainstream economics’ barriers to doing this, and shows they produce a view of the relationship between ethics and economics that excludes ethics from economics. Mainstream economics sees this relationship as interdisciplinary – an ethics and economics. I argue it should be seen as multidisciplinary – an ethics in economics. The mainstream regards ethical values as subjective assuming that there are no facts about ethical values. But there is considerable factual evidence about what people’s ethical values are. One influential source I review is the decades of accumulated survey research in the World Values Survey. The paper then discusses two ways researchers can incorporate evidence about values in their empirical work. First, drawing from Stratification economics, it shows how we can identify ethical values overlooked by the mainstream in discriminatory employment settings, and how this can stimulate search for new data and lead to new theoretical hypotheses. Second, it shows how experiments-based research can identify ethical values people employ in different market settings, in this example, those used to determine how people are willing to ration health care. The paper concludes with brief discussion of how, for a multidisciplinary ethics in economics, ethics can affect future economics.