SOME GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM APPROACHES IN MODELLING ETHICS AND VALUES IN THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM

In recent times there have been attempts by well known economists towards integrating the questions of ethics and values in the body framework of economic theory. Yet their pursuits have remained subservient to one or the other of received economic doctrines. This has proven to be a drawback in the development of an independent inquiry into the possibility of treating the problem of ethical integration as an endogenous phenomen of the system. The idea of ethical endogeneity here means, that society is not merely a reflection of the social policies undertaken by the collective of members of a democratic and decentralized polity. It must also reflect multiple rounds of social transformation realized by the impact of the reverse relation of the ecological environment on the polity itself. Contrary to this concept, the view on ethics and values in the social system presented by the contemporary school of economists and philosophers has the essence of exogeneity. That means ethics and values are made to impact upon the economy but from outside the system. In the system itself they become irrelevant. Vickrey has the following words on the treatment of values by economists in the area of normative economics: “But it is only recently that economists have begun to probe into the systems of values that underlie their discussions, and indeed in many cases the judgements are implicit, rather than explicitly stated.”