Evolutionary Economics and Moral Relativism - Some Thoughts

Martin Binder ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Doubts about the decidability of moral questions have often been used as an excuse for economists to eschew any normative propositions. Evolutionary economics, still lacking a well-developed normative branch, gives rise to a form of descriptive moral relativism. This paper wants to explore the consequences of adopting a form of meta-ethical and normative moral relativism as well. It develops a normative position called ‘naturalistic relativism’, which is a naturalistically reconstructed neo-pragmatist form of relativism. The paper also gives an argument why this position seems to be the adequate normative correlate for evolutionary economics.

Keywords: evolutionary economics; moral relativism; sensory utilitarianism; continuity hypothesis; naturalistic relativism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z00 B52 B41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-hpe and nep-pke
Date: 2006-08-22
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1484/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:1484

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Address: Schackstr. 4, D-80539 Munich, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ekkehart Schlicht ().