Present in any discipline is an overarching goal that drives the research and application of the field. In some specialties, these goals are generally uncontroversial. But in others, societal effects have far-reaching ethical implications. A paradigmatic example of this is biological weapons research, in which a purely scientific objective comes into conflict with moral values. Similarly, economics plays a role in the well-being of society. Thus, it would be prudent for the Department of Economics to require that concentrators spend at least one semester studying ethics.
Personally, I’ve always found the traditional debate over economic policy to be painfully fruitless. Each party proposes a different plan, with each claiming that its plan is superior and that the opposition’s is misinformed. But it seems misguided to debate the details when the fundamental goals of the policies are completely different. It’s like debating whether a fork is superior to a spoon. Just like objects, policies are evaluated on a context-dependent basis — with the relevant objective being the appropriate context.
Of course, plenty of disincentives discourage politicians from ever actually bringing up these underlying issues. The less a politician commits to a stance on any issue, the more he or she can appeal to the entire electorate.
But economics concentrators at Brown aren’t running for office just yet, and they could certainly stand to benefit from questioning their assumptions every now and again. To give a student the tools to understand and actively support some economic progress is dangerous without first ensuring his or her careful contemplation of what that progress ought to entail.
The ability to problem-solve presupposes a knowledge of the desired outcome. All the construction personnel and equipment in the world are useless without a blueprint to guide them. The mathematical tools learned in an economics classroom allow students to solve artificially created goals on their tests, just as our weapons researcher has the ability to solve the artificially created goals designated in his government contract. But artificial objectives are just that — artificial. They serve as surrogates for what would be thought of as morally desirable goals, such as increasing power-efficiency in a mechanical heart as a proxy for improving a patient’s quality of life.
Such artificial goals are always a secondary — a means to an ultimate end. Without such an end, there could be no goals of consequence, as there would be no standard by which one could assess outcomes as good or bad. There is no point in improving the design of a mechanical heart if there is no evaluative difference between the outcomes of keeping patients alive and well or letting them suffer or die. It is only through moral ends that we can derive such value. For the sake of meaningful argument, I will assume that objective moral facts exist and that we can obtain some understanding of them. Assuredly, these are controversial assumptions to make, but without them, the entire discussion is moot.
So what is the proper end? Maximizing total utility? Protecting individual property rights? Taking an ethics class almost certainly won’t give you a definitive answer to this question, but that doesn’t mean the answer isn’t worth pursuing or that nothing can be gained from the pursuit.
Let’s say you justify progressive taxation via utilitarianism — i.e. a dollar in the hand of a homeless man provides more happiness than it would were it to remain in Ebenezer Scrooge’s bank account. If that’s your measure of value, you have to understand and accept all the implications that go along with believing in such a normative system. You’d almost certainly be committed to supporting torture if it could save lives. You might even have to believe that the clinically depressed should be medicated against their will — or even exterminated.
Considerations such as these give us pause and make us wonder if we really have the correct goal in mind. But no matter how you want to justify your positions — economic or otherwise — some backing must exist and the foundations of your system cannot be taken for granted.
The argument I have presented so far would suggest that everyone should take an ethics class — which everyone definitely should — but this doesn’t explain why economics concentrators in particular should be required to do so. It’s because of both the significance and undecided nature of the topic. Whatever the ultimate ethical goal, economic policy probably plays an enormous role in moving either toward or away from it. Additionally, if people tended to agree upon specifics, there would be much less of a practical need to know which goal was correct since most of them necessitate similar policies.
Questioning basic beliefs is quintessential to the Brunonian ethos, and given the vehement disagreements inherent to economics, addressing ethicswould seem especially necessary.
Andrew Powers ’15 can be reached at andrew_powers@brown.edu.
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