ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the intersection between ethics and economics, recalling that the discipline of economics emerged gradually out of a moral philosophical tradition that stretched back to the ancient world. It explores three main categories of normative ethical theories that will be helpful to keep in mind as the origins of the ideas that form modern economics: virtue ethics; deontological ethics; and consequentialist ethics. Aristotle dealt separately with two different types of justice: distributive justice and commutative or rectifactory justice. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle relates distributive justice to a geometric proportion, in reference to the distribution of spending from the public treasury. Over time, particularly after the integration of utilitarianism into economics in the 19th century, the ethical questions became a less prominent part of the dialogue within the discipline. By the mid-20th century, most economists assumed that behavior was motivated by an ethic of utility maximization.
