The economic downtown that began in 2008 has had tremendous consequences in the United States (and abroad), including declines in traditional economic variables such as gross domestic product, the stock indices, and employment, as well as the broader measures of well-being detailed in other...

Economics and ethics have been linked since the days of Adam Smith, but this connection became tenuous after the formalization of economic theory in the twentieth century, the success of which in academia, government, and business serves to insulate it from ethical critique. Nonetheless, a field...

Economics and ethics are both valuable tools for analyzing the behavior and actions of human beings and institutions. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, considered them two sides of the same coin, but since economics was formalized and mathematicised in the late 1800s and early 1900s,...

In this essay, I explore the parallels between the two perspectives Smith takes in The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and two types of duties described in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Many people who familiar with Kantian ethics know chiefly of the perfect duties...

Many governments around the world are considering measures of happiness or subjective well-being as alternatives to gross domestic product (GDP) for the purpose of guiding economic policymaking. Compared to GDP, happiness measures promise to better capture the quality of life of a nation's...

This paper looks at the ethical issues behind the right to try movement, which supports giving terminal patients access to drugs that have yet to be approved fully by the FDA. Even as momentum builds and more states pass right-to-try legislation, the discussion to this point has mostly addressed...

The first half of the chapter outlines positive criticisms of neoclassical law and economics from the viewpoint of Austrian economics. Because Austrians believe that calculation of economic costs and benefits requires a system of property rights, we cannot use economics to determine those very...

In this chapter, I argue that the market is the institutional embodiment of human dignity, especially respect for dignity between relatively anonymous persons engaged in commerce. I explain Immanuel Kant's conception of dignity, discuss how it relates to the market, and then offer an application...

Several noted legal scholars, most prominently Richard Posner, have applied the economic analysis of law to the debate over same-sex marriage. In this note, I argue that the economic approach to law is ill-equipped to deal with the issues of principle, dignity, and rights that are at the core of...