ABSTRACT
Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made. Even when I was a student, economics was still part of the moral sciences tripos at Cambridge University. It can claim to be a moral science, therefore, from its origin, if for no other reason. Nevertheless, for many economists the very term “moral science” will seem like a contradiction. We are strongly imbued today with the view that science should be wertfrei and we believe that science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgment and has only been able to take off into the vast universe of the “is” by escaping from the treacherous launching pad of the “ought.” Even economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought. Who, indeed, would want to exchange the delicate rationality of the theory of equilibrium price for the unoperational vaporings of a “just price” controversy? In the battle between mechanism and moralism, generally mechanism has won hands down, and I shall not be surprised if the very title of my address does not arouse musty fears of sermonizing in the minds of many of my listeners.
