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A virtue ethics critique of ethical dimensions of behavioral economics
Author(s) -
Koehn Daryl
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
business and society review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.524
H-Index - 21
eISSN - 1467-8594
pISSN - 0045-3609
DOI - 10.1111/basr.12208
Subject(s) - normative , rationality , business ethics , action (physics) , compliance (psychology) , virtue ethics , positive economics , behavioral economics , epistemology , virtue , meta ethics , behavioural economics , character (mathematics) , sociology , psychology , economics , social psychology , political science , law , information ethics , philosophy , management , microeconomics , physics , geometry , mathematics , quantum mechanics
Abstract Behavioral economics is the latest trendy form of economics. Increasingly theorists are advocating using behavioral economics to do normative ethics or claiming that the behavioralists’ findings render normative claims otiose. I argue in this paper that we should be extremely wary when it comes to accepting any such normative pronouncements. I argue that behavioral economics: (a) minimizes and/or misunderstands the role that character and architectonic life goals play in accounting for the why of ethical behavior, (b) fundamentally misconceives human practical rationality, (c) often unduly narrows the range of human action and choice, (d) misleadingly assumes that options are merely given to us rather than generated by us in accordance with our character, (e) is parasitic upon normative ethics, (f) results in an unhelpful ad hoc approach to ethical thinking, which is unlikely to prove all that useful and may even dangerously mislead ordinary agents or those who operate corporate compliance programs and who seek to improve corporate cultures, and (g) ignores the key role played in ethical behavior by meso‐ and macro‐factors.