ABSTRACT
The extent to which the “scientific asceticism” is harming the comprehension of the problems of a post-industrial society and how far it contributed to making ethics of human rights (EHR) a sort of pure ethical code of conduct is manifest to all. EHR’s proper contribution to a transdisciplinary methodology in the realm of social science is to be found in the offering of a hermeneutical horizon promoting a change of those categories of thought that are the basis of economic discourse. How one arrives at a specific theory of the labor market or how one is capable of explaining the level of income produced by a certain economy is totally unconcerned with the value options stemming from EHR. The chapter concludes with a description of the essential differences between the principle of the exchange of equivalents underlying the sphere of private economy, and the principle of reciprocity underlying the sphere of civil economy.
