I came across a very intriguing academic article published by Cato Institute, the famous think-tank for the furtherance of free markets. It said that economists need to construct a moral argument, or at least integrate the idea of morality into their economic models in order to protect themselves from unwitty comments and esoteric arguments coming from non-economists:
“economists [should] use their understanding to effectively defend market arrangements, and the general benefits they provide, against moral sophistries used by politicians and their special-interest clients to justify policies to protect politically favored groups against the discipline of market competition. Unfortunately, making amoral”
Right now, morality is divorced from economics because it is an unbiased value-free science. However, unbiased as it is, mainstream economics argues for a world disciplined by the force of markets. Now here is where things get complicated. Morality is a form of discipline based on codes and rules of conduct:
In the same vein, mainstream economics is based on certain code of conducts (methodological underpinnings that revolve around mathematical models) that is accepted by anyone who understands and acquiesce to the rules of the discipline. Economics is another form of morality. This acknowledgment would be more important for economics as all markets are disciplined, thus they are morally charged.
