The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Edited by Hugh LaFollette, print pages 1552–1561. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/ 9781444367072.wbiee674 1 Economics and Ethics Geoffrey Brennan and Daniel D. Moseley At first glance, the disciplines of ethics and economics seem to be two ships passing in the night – or if not “passing,” then perhaps on collision course. One might wonder whether, if the ships did actually collide, many in either discipline would notice or even care. But what seems indisputable is that economics and ethics relate (where they do) under a cloak of darkness. They pass, or collide, mostly “at night”! Our aim here is to bring their relations into the light of common day. There are at least three points of intersection between economics and ethics: ● the ethics of economics; ● ethics in economics; ● ethics out of economics. In offering this categorization, it will help to draw a distinction between two ways of understanding what economics is – one by reference to its method; the other to its subject matter. For example, much space in the best journals is concerned with the “economics of …” where the blank can be filled in with a variety of possibilities: the economics of crime; of politics; of sport; of religious observance; of identity; and so on. Mainstream economists will recognize all these applications as economics in the “method” sense to the extent that: they attend to the pattern of interactions among putatively rational individuals; they appeal in some way to differential incentives as a means of coordinating behavior and/or to changes in those incentives in explaining behavioral changes; they employ abstract models and certain standard analytic tech- niques (e.g., maximization subject to constraint) to derive hypotheses and/or sub- ject such hypotheses to empirical testing in some relevant domain. However, as is evident from the list, none of these applications deals directly with topics that most would think of as “economic” in the subject-matter sense. At the same time, it would be possible to analyse what is recognizably economic subject matter by employing modes of thinking that are not economic in the forego- ing sense – as when, for example, sociologists or anthropologists might examine specific instances of market exchange, or when political scientists might analyse trade flows in terms of political leaders’ personalities. Very few economists would recognize such efforts as “proper” economics – a fact that reveals the significance of method in economists’ understanding of their own turf. In terms of our own three categories, the first – “the ethics of economics” – interprets economics predominantly in terms of subject matter. Under this rubric, “economic” phenomena in the subject-matter sense are evaluated in terms of familiar ethical theories (e.g., consequentialism, deontology, or virtue ethics; see virtue ethics.)