Mixing economics and ethics: Carl Menger vs Gustav von Schmoller
- 2004
- p.5-33.
- Mar
Schmoller and Menger provide strictly antagonistic accounts of how ethics and economics should be related. Their contensions are mainly methodological. Whereas Schmoller hopes to integrate ethics within economics in order to improve its empirical basis. Menger wishes to identify the different behavioural mechanisms linked to the economic and the ethical perspectives, and therefore wants to keep them separate wherever possible. Menger's critique of Schmoller's account suggests that the integration of ethics within economics cannot rationally be grounded upon postulates of psychological realism and methodological collectivism, as Schmoller proposed. Reproduced.