The Separation of Economics from Virtue: A Historical-Conceptual Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to explain what philosophical commitments drove mainstream professional economists to understand their own discipline as leaving no space for ethics (including virtue) between 1887 and 1971. In particular, it is argued that economics embraced a technocratic conception of politics and science. Philosophers, too, embraced and continue to embrace a number of commitments about philosophy and science that entrench a sharp division of labor between philosophers and economics and that keep not just ethics, but virtue, outside of economics. Many of these philosophers’ commitments were adopted by economists, such that they could assume, in practice, that there is a self-sufficient apolitical domain of pure economics.