Happiness Research*: Contributions to Economic Ethics1

Zusammenfassung

---

Empirical happiness research has been gaining wide acknowledgement recently and offers a promising new access to the question how choice and happiness relate to each other. Since this is a central question to both ethics and economics, it seems worthwhile to investigate what this perspective can contribute to economic ethics. The pragmatic approach and the ideological permissiveness of the argument developed here might alienate moral philosophers. Yet, when economic ethics is understood as having not only an epistemological ambition but also a practical one, i.e., as seeking not only to clarify what constitutes good economic and business practice, but also to contribute intellectually to its becoming reality, the present endeavor may be forgiven the dents and bumps in the disciplinary bridges it has attempted to erect.

Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes

Auszug

---

Happiness Research*: Contributions to Economic Ethics1

1. Introduction

The interest in empirical and experimental economics has virtually exploded among economists during the last few decades. A symptom of this development, and probably a boost to future research, has been the award of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics to Vernon Smith and Daniel Kahneman, an experimental economists and a psychologist, respectively. This change is accompanied by increasing efforts on the side of economists to bridge disciplinary cleavages, in particular that towards psychology. This widening of perspective is gradually breaking up the axiomatic seclusion of economics and in particular that of its behavioral foundations.

While this development has sparked substantial critique at the neoclassical conception of behavior and decision making, few scholars go so far as to question the underlying idea of rational utility maximization as such. Such a more fundamental critique, it will be argued here, will emerge once the remaining disciplinary gaps between economics and psychology on the one hand and that between economics and ethics on the other hand are tackled.

Rather than using such interdisciplinary bridges merely for firing ethical critique at the other side, ethicists, or more precisely economic ethicists, should recognize that such bridges can and should be walked both ways. By asking themselves how ethics can be enriched by empirical research, they stand to gain much more than they can lose. The purpose of this article is to do just that: to investigate what empirical happiness research can contribute to economic ethics.

To do so, I will have to start with a brief analysis of the psychological foundations of economics in which the free will (or rather its absence) plays the central role and represents the (missing) link to ethics. A discussion of happiness will then clarify this concept without attempting a complete definition. section four will report some empirical evidence of happiness research and assess its significance for economic ethics. The conclusion will then look at the results obtained from a methodological perspective.

2. The psychological foundations of economics

The science of economics can be interpreted as being nothing more than the deduction of specific rules from a single general psychological principle, to wit utility maximization. Additional principles may be invoked in specific contexts - such as risk avoidance, time preference etc. - but these represent just specifications of, not departures from, the utility maximization principle.

The nature of this principle is well known. Basically, it says that whatever people do, they do it in order to maximize their utility (thi...

Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes

---