时间：2018年8月7日（下周二）晚上19:00-20:30；
地点：阳民学术工作室（郑州大学新校区商学院大楼408室）；
主讲：周阳敏 博士；
内容提纲：
1，假疫苗的良知拷问；
2，作为道德科学的经济学究竟有什么价值？
3，作为道德科学的经济学如何认识毒奶粉、毒疫苗、毒馒头等事件？
4，作为道德科学的经济学提出什么方案解决毒疫苗问题？

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具体内容：
“Moral sciences” as a designation of a field of inquiry came into widespread usage
following the Scottish Enlightenment, reached the peak of its popularity during the
last third of the nineteenth century, and – despite the important efforts of John
Maynard Keynes and Kenneth Boulding among others to revive it – the term,
together with the concept behind it virtually disappeared by the middle of the 20th.
Limited interest in its meaning resurfaced only in the last decade or so. This collection
of essays is concerned with reconsidering economics as a moral science in
place of its present configuration as a particular form of applied mathematics.
Despite the frequent use of the term, the precise scope and meaning of moral
science had not been given much systematic attention. In its early career it tended to
echo the distinction between natural and moral philosophy, and to rely on the generally
accepted contrast between corporeal and incorporeal reality with the moral sciences
occupying the latter domain. However, the curriculum actually specified for
the tripos in Moral Sciences at Cambridge University provides a fair picture of the
scope and content of this subject, and, perhaps more significantly, places economics
as the object of inquiry in a context it has lost upon gaining its status as an
Remarkably, he adds:
After that they (the scientists) go back to experience not to confirm it, but to apply their
Economics then is not a science dedicated to the study of a reality independent
of it, but, rather, a scheme for crafting human behavior to accord with a predetermined,
axiomatic criterion.
The search for the common element of wealth among its innumerable forms –
ranging from land, art objects, stocks, bonds, cash, intellectual property to precious
metals – has not been successful because value is not a property of any of these
objects in the sense the valance of an element is the property of that element. Their
respective values are socially constructed separately and distinctly from each other.
It may be said that the value of a plot of land is dependent on the use to which it is
put, but that use is a social construction that changes with the ceaseless reconstruction
of social reality. Not surprisingly, unlike physicists, chemists and biologists,
economists do not employ measuring instruments because none can be fashioned
for the measurement of any reality with which economists are concerned. Measuring
instruments cannot be devised for phenomena consisting of incommensurable components,
and where, to make matters even more difficult, these incommensurate
components are highly reflexive. Reflexivity in economics is compounded because
the variables of economic events affect each other through the agency of human
beings, who are both the objects and the subjects of those events.5 Economic phenomena
are always necessarily incommensurate because they occur in historical
time and space. Reflexivity reinforces their incommensurability, because the effects
of reflexivity are unlikely to be the same at different points in time or space. If, for
example, labor is measured in units of man-hours, in what units should capital be
measured so as to make any mathematical representation of the two in, for example,
an equation meaningful and empirically truthful? So, when economists write, as
they do:
O = f(L,C)
where L is the quantity of labor, C the quantity of capital and O is the rate of output,
what is the unit of L and the unit of C such that the combination of the two can give
us a meaningful and truthful O?6 What is that C, that may be represented by a number?
The original paid-in capital, market capitalization, break-up value, etc. and on
what day of the week are we to undertake its measurement? Accordingly, it is a
conceit to assume that the techniques available and appropriate for the natural sciences
are appropriate for an understanding of intentional, purposeful human behavior.
Those techniques are crafted to be applied to an ontologically independent
object. Economics seeks scientific status through the construction of a surrogate
reality consisting of objects that are produced through a process of reification, in
short, on the basis of objects made with words. But the theoretical knowledge constructed
with this strategy, − employed by corporations and policy makers – is at
odds with the practical knowledge with which people make their economic decisions.
The result is an unsustainable tension between the behavior prescribed by
corporate and political policy makers and the every day morality of human beings.
In the name of the overriding superiority of theoretical over practical knowledge,
modern economic theory has therefore forced a paradigm on society that is at odds
with how people make decisions about their material needs in line with their conscience.
What then is the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge,
and to which of the two does the stuff of economics belong?
Practical knowledge7 is the human capacity for the reflective and critical evaluation
of our reasons for action. It is the totality of all of our capacities – including
feelings, tastes, knowledge, experience, impulses and rational reasoning – ordered
and filtered by our ability to critically evaluate these sources of our lives we engage
and deploy in making decisions. It is, in short, the knowledge we deploy when
deciding what is to be done. Theoretical knowledge, in contrast, disconnects these
sources, and, instead, gains knowledge of objects and phenomena that exist and
function independently of human intention. The objects of practical knowledge are
profoundly different from the objects of theoretical knowledge. It may be true, as
Hilary Putnam has it,8 that the rigid separation of fact from value has become
untenable,9 but the collapse of that distinction does not diminish the difference
between theoretical and practical knowledge. As Putnam himself recognizes:
I think that Aristotle was profoundly right in holding that ethics is concerned with how to
live and with human happiness, and also profoundly right in holding that this sort of knowledge
(‘practical knowledge’) is different from theoretical knowledge. A view of knowledge
that acknowledges that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of ‘science’ seems
to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or
of science.
Modern economic theory, a deeply positivist discipline, regards practical knowledge
– if it regards it as any sort of knowledge at all – as exogenous to its concerns,
as a form of knowledge that may perhaps exist prior to the formation of economic
objects, such as preferences. It posits preferences as objects capable of ordinal
ordering, and, as such, separable from what went into their formation. But preferences
have no intelligible meaning if deprived of the intentionality and the purpose
with which they are formed. Goods can be ordered ordinally only if they are commensurable
on some common basis, and they can be rendered commensurable only
by eliminating the intentionality inherent in any choice. In real life there are no
Pareto optimal outcomes because the objects without inherent intentionality with
respect to which such outcome can be determined do not exist. Mill’s famous axiom
to the effect that ‘a greater gain is preferred to a lesser one’ is, at heart, a tautology,
one that is true if and only if the greater and the lesser gain both consist of material
that is, in Keynes’ words, ‘constant and homogeneous’, and if and only if the context
in which they are commensured is constant and identical. The ‘greater’, in other
words, must be of the same stuff as the ‘lesser’ and must not contain, in Mill’s own
words, ‘disturbing causes’. But the objects of economics, given that they do not
exist in nature, are necessarily ‘caused’ by human intentionality, and it is economic
theory, rather than some intrinsic property of the object, that determines which
causes should be deemed ‘disturbing’. If either one of these requirements is not met,
if, for example, the greater gain entails a lesser honor (e.g. because it is obtained
with dishonest intent) and the lesser gain a greater honor, the preference for the
former cannot be formed on Mill’s quantitative basis.
Virtually all of the debate about the ethical content of economic life and the
objects of economics, − constructed so as to permit a claim of scientific status for
the discipline – has been epistemological, and has disregarded the ontological characteristics
of the objects under study. Modern economics has assumed that its
objects are ontologically objective, but this assumption is unwarranted, and the
problem is much more serious than the epistemological fact/value dichotomy.
Economics cannot be the subject of theoretical knowledge, because, whichever definition
one chooses from among the many on offer, its objects are mind-dependent,
ontologically subjective contrivances; it is necessarily about what should be done,
and, as such, it is a form of practical knowledge.
The essays in this book reassess the domain of economics from a range of perspectives
with a view to showing, that economics is indeed a moral science. The
cost of divorcing the discipline from practical knowledge is that economic events
and decisions are deprived of all moral meaning. The consequence of this violence,
at best, is that the decisions taken along the lines prescribed by theory are amoral, at
worst, that they are very bad decisions with serious consequences. With the cultivation
of this end, economists take on the words given to Werhner von Braun in the
Harvard mathematician and part-time song writer Tom Lehrer’s song about the
great German scientist:
Once the rockets are up,
Who cares where they come down,
That’s not my department,
Says Wernher von Braun.
Whether one prefers Lehrer’s mordant humor or the profound wisdom of Pope
Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium (in particular paragraphs 55, 62 and 206), the
P. Rona
9
fundamental
point – namely that all human deeds have an irreducible and inalienable
moral content – remains constant. Morality is not something we add to a model
constructed without it; one built without morality as its integral component is an
unsound structure. Restoring economics to its former habitat as a moral science, a
science of practical knowledge, cannot be evaded.