ABSTRACT
Certain aspects of the doctrine of the "economic interpretation" form a natural and convenient avenue of approach to a consideration of the relations between economics and ethics and throw light on the scope and method of both these divisions of knowledge. Economics and ethics naturally come into rather intimate relations with each other since both recognizedly deal with the problem of value. There is a deeper source of confusion in the conception of the method of economics which also involves the relation between economics and ethics. Of the various sorts of data dealt with in economics no group is more fundamental or more universally and unquestioningly recognized as such than human wants. Economics has always treated desires or motives as facts, of a character susceptible to statement in propositions, and sufficiently stable during the period of the activity which they prompt to be treated as causes of that activity in a scientific sense.
