Meta‐ethical Reasoning: Applied to Economics and Business Principles

Bernard J. Reilly and Myron J. Kyj

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1994, vol. 53, issue 2, 147-162

Abstract: Abstract. Ethics and ethical thinking involve two primary and interdependent elements of analysis: the individual and the society. Economic thought dichotomized these two elements into the individual (competitive capitalism) or the society (Marxist socialism), with one element being the cause, and the other the effect. Views of economic reality were developed not on the basis of the interdependence of the individual and the society but their mutual antagonism. Economic thought is based on the scientific reasoning of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its abstract definition of reality narrowed the significance of the concrete appearances of things in favor of the rules (science) that define things. Science requires both an objective causal order (independent of human definitions and beliefs) and the development of laws (independent of the human observer or participant) that explain the nature of the objective world. Ethical reasoning requires that economic causality be defined to include both the individual and the society. Ethical reasoning is needed to bring together both the scientific and the metaphysical for human meaning. The science of means must be joined to the human purposes of ends.

Date: 1994
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