Adam Smith infused the expression “impartial spectator” with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which normally would aptly take the definite article the, and which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator of an...

This paper addresses the enduring insistence on the moral dimension of international economic relations in Keynes's economics and diplomacy. The issue has so far raised scarce attention in the literature, which tend to attribute some outstanding failures of Keynes's economic diplomacy to the...

Few economists speak of talk in considering human interaction. Deirdre McCloskey is one who does. The paper considers what it means to take talk seriously, its connection to moral philosophy, and to innovation

Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment ideology, which includes Adam Smith's moral theory, lacks any sense of telos and will, therefore, fail in the long run. This article accepts MacIntyre's challenge and examines Smith's moral philosophy arguing that Smith did not completely discard...

Kenneth Boulding's AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding's argument that economics could not be...

Academic departmentalization has limited the dimensionality and thus the richness of analysis in the social sciences. The author examines the case of a modem economics as an example. He reviews the ideas of Williamson (2000), who cites the limits of scope in the New Institutional Economics;...

In the field of business ethics, Adam Smith has generally been viewed with a measure of suspicion. Smith's famous invocation of the invisible hand - according to which self-interest promotes the greater good - has generally been seen as a fundamental challenge to a discipline committed to the...

Ludwig von Mises pioneered the praxeological critique of economic interventionism. He argued that the state's manipulation of market processes through wage and price controls, taxes and subsidies, central bank credit manipulation, and other regulatory policies would create unintended and...

There are two elements which make Smith's ethics unique as well as more universal in nature. The first is that it is a positive theory of ethics in the sense that it is not about what is intrinsically good or just as it is about the way in which people form their opinion about it. The second is...