ABSTRACT
C. Devas opened his Political Economy with the statement that economics was purely a branch of ethics. There is one kind of value-judgement which is inevitable not just throughout economics, but throughout all science, and this is the preliminary value-judgement that a particular topic is the right one to study. But the attempt must be made; only by doing so can different economists’ stances on positive economics — sometimes confused, often confusing — be both appreciated and compared. Economists who chose the latter course had so much the less to lose in succumbing to the formalities of marginalism. Yet the marginal revolution did build one bridge between economics and ethics, in that it revived economists’ interest in the unsolved ethical problems of utilitarianism. W. J. Ashley believed that value-judgements must be made by any economist ‘ready to allow that political economy ought to treat material interests as subordinate to the higher ends of human development’.
