A note on value-neutrality
Friday, March 19th, 2010The Journal staff found this excerpt from Charles K. Wilber’s Ethics In Economic Theory (Post Autistic Economics Review #20, 3 June 2003):
“The defense of value-neutrality still stands, but the pillars have been shaken. Blaug conceded that both ‘factual’ and ‘moral’ arguments rest ‘at bottom’ on certain definite techniques of persuasion, which in turn depend for their effectiveness on shared values of one kind or another. And, of course, McCloskey’s writings on the “rhetoric of economics” have taken this argument into the heart of economics – The American Economic Review – where mainstream economists have studiously ignored it.”
