"Understood properly economics is an ethical science, an important branch of applied moral philosophy. For it concerns how to understand, manage and fulfil the heterogeneous and often conflicting values, interests, and capacities of large numbers of individuals operating within the constraints of limited resources in a particular community. That system-level attention to the key aspects of heterogeneity, conflict, and scarcity within a community should be a central concern of moral philosophy, but it generally isn’t (except for some political philosophers).

Most moral philosophy focuses instead on different kinds of question: meta-ethics concerns the ultimate nature and meaning of ethics; normative ethics is about articulating theories of the right and the good, like utilitarianism or deontology; and applied ethics is focused on the rights and wrongs of controversial issues, like abortion or animal testing. Society and its complications are generally absent. This lacuna frequently leads moral philosophers to wish away or parenthesise (idealise) those aspects of heterogeneity, conflict and scarcity unavoidable in a moral community.

Economists as social scientists have been working on this area for a very long time, and have much of importance to say about it".

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