Economics and Ethics

One of the swiftest developments during the transition from state-socialism was the reconfiguration of the intellectual field in the social sciences.  Mainstream (neoclassical) economics, for example, has occupied not only academic, but also important political positions in the East and Central European countries.  However, if reports on the crisis of the economic sciences in the Western world are correct, and economics is indeed undergoing a process of fragmentation and reorientation, then we should more vigorously scrutinize its most fundamental building blocks and seek to develop alternative research approaches.  In our region, which had experienced the ideological omnipotence of Marxist dialectical materialism, it is especially crucial to challenge the domination of any single school of economic thought.  
The first drafts of the papers in this thematic section were discussed in the Center for Pluralistic Economic Studies, established at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences in 1997.  The first essay, “Adam Smith’s Wealth of the Nations and the Philosophy of the Enlightenment,” written by László Fekete, shows how classical political economy separated from moral philosophy and became an independent but not value-free social science.  In the next article, entitled “Ethics and Economics,” György Pataki investigates some of the ethical aspects of modern welfare economics.  In his paper, “Economy and Morality,” Péter Gedeon analyzes Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis on the end of history and his ideas on the role some traditional and moral values play in modern economy.  The last essay in the section is entitled “The Experience of Beyond-Existence.”  In this philosophical piece, Sándor Horváth seeks to accomodate the basic principles of existentialism, ethics, and economics.