Integrating vulnerability: on the impact of caring on economic theorizing

The story which conventional economic theory unfolds, however, is a story about the autonomous and the independent. No wonder that the science should have problems dealing with those whose autonomy is temporarily or permanently limited or entirely lacking. For “if [economists] persist in characterizing people as people only insomuch as they can be seen as autonomous agents – requiring that the world be fitted into [economists’] norms of methodological individualism – [economists’] modeling stops here” (J.A. Nelson 1996: 65).