Ethics and economics, friends or foes? An educational debate

Abstract

This paper reviews an ongoing debate about moral standards for vocational education in German speaking countries. At the centre of the controversy is the question of universalistic versus domain‐specific moral orientations, namely the question of whether business people ought to develop different moral points of view in different situations (such as ‘private’ versus ‘professional’). Of pivotal importance in this context is also a prominent ethical approach (by Karl Homann, a philosopher in the tradition of liberal economists) which serves as a foundation for those who advocate domain specificity and which is strongly criticized by their counterparts. This approach is also presented, since the author believes that it does not entail all of what its protagonists claim. Moreover, as argued in the last section, the purported dichotomy of universalism versus domain specificity may even be entirely overcome. The point is that Homann's ethics perhaps do not fit into the framework of Kohlberg's six stages and might therefore be reconstructed as entailing moral segmentation. However, it is well accommodated by a more comprehensive stage taxonomy suggested by the author.

Notes

Johannes Gutenberg‐Universita¨t Mainz, FB 03, Abteilung Wirtschaftspa¨dagogik, D‐55099 Mainz, Germany. Email: minnamei@uni‐mainz.de

Teaching economics has been shown to encourage students to defect in the prisoner's dilemma. There have been attempts to try to reverse this effect, with some success, with the help of ethical training, so as to stimulate cooperation (see James & Cohen, 2004). However, the thrust of the prisoner's dilemma is that it is irrational, even for a moral person, to cooperate in the dilemma, which is also why economists claim that morality has to be put into the institutions. Hence, the question arises of whether it is educationally responsible to train people to cooperate in such situations, where they are likely to lose out in the end, and how this could be morally justified.

However, it still remains to be shown that this meta‐cognitive bridging of diverse moral points of view is not a genuine form of moral reflection of its own that reintegrates those diverging moral orientations (see also the section on the third approach).

Similarly and although not considering himself a communitarian, Buchanan (1994, pp. 76–77) has argued ‘that preferences may, themselves, be modified in the process of socialization and acculturalization that describe the operation of the whole social environment in which a person is born, grows and continues to live. … To acknowledge the influence of feedback between the social environment and preferences is not to deny either the individuality of persons, as defined by their preferences, or the relative imperviousness of such preferences to environmental influence’.

For his concessions in the 1980s compare publications like ‘Justice as fairness: political not metaphysical’ (Rawls, 1985) and ‘The domain of the political and overlapping consensus’ (Rawls, 1989).

This rationale even applies to the very fact that, in reality, one cannot always articulate one's personal point of view, reject certain plans, strictly control the people in charge and dismiss them whenever public opinion turns against them (or when stakeholders are discontented with the management of a company). Officials have to be granted some autonomy in order to do their job and to be able to carry through, say, nasty but necessary measures. This is merely a kind of voluntary self‐restriction on the part of the people and nothing that corrupts Homann's and Buchanan's basic idea of grass roots democracy and unanimous consent. The required unanimity and also the principle of an individual right to veto can only be assumed theoretically, because realized rigorously they would create transaction costs that the very same people would not be willing to pay and the possibility of blocking decisions, which no one wants. Therefore, the empirical restriction of the theoretical requirements is in fact desired (to an economically determinable extent) and does not constitute a systematic flaw.

The original Kantian expression from the Critique of pure reason reads ‘Thoughts without content are empty, contemplation without concepts is blind’ (Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind) (Kant, 1968, p. 48).