The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics

For over a century the economics profession has extended its reach to encompass policy formation and institutional design while largely ignoring the ethical challenges that attend the profession's influence over the lives of others. Economists have proven to be disinterested in ethics. Embracing emotivism, they often treat ethics a matter of mere preference. Moreover, economists tend to be hostile to professional economic ethics, which they incorrectly equate with a code of conduct that would be at best ineffectual and at worst disruptive to good economic practice. But good ethical reasoning is not reducible to mere tastes, and professional ethics is not reducible to a code. Instead, professional economic ethics refers to a new field of investigation-a tradition of sustained and lively inquiry into the irrepressible ethical entailments of academic and applied economic practice.

The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics explores a wide range of questions related to the nature of ethical economic practice and the content of professional economic ethics. It explores current thinking that has emerged in these areas while widening substantially the terrain of economic ethics. There has never been a volume that poses so directly and intensively the question of the need for and content of professional ethics for economics. The Handbook incorporates the work of leading scholars and practitioners, including academic economists from various theoretical traditions; applied economists, beyond academia, whose work has direct and immense social impact; and philosophers, professional ethicists, and others whose work has addressed the nature of professionalism and its implications for ethical practice.


Author: George F. Demartino
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 02/01/2016
Pages: 800
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.30lbs
Size: 9.80h x 7.00w x 1.90d
ISBN: 9780199766635

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2016

About the Author

George F. DeMartino is a Professor of International Economics and Co-Director of the program in Global Finance, Trade, and Economic Integration in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Deirdre N. McCloskey is UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics and History, Professor of English, and Professor of Communication, Emerita, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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