The major impediment standing in the way for economists seeking to understand Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TTMS) and The Wealth of Nations (WN) is demonstrated to be their confusion over the terms, prudence, used by Smith in the standard Aristotelian sense in TTMS to mean putting...

Societies prohibit many transactions considered morally repugnant, although potentially efficiency-enhancing. We conducted an online choice experiment to characterize preferences for the morality and efficiency of payments to kidney donors. Preferences were heterogeneous, ranging from...

The chapter analyses how Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme was uncovered by Harry Markopolos, an employee of Rampart Investment Management, LLC, and the contribution of so-called epistemic virtues to Markopolos' success. After Rampart had informed the firm about an allegedly highly successful hedge...

The moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) and the author Mary Shelley (1798-1851) are studied in different spheres of the academy, for rather different purposes, with no supposed reason for dialogue. We claim in a close concurrent reading, however, that Smith and...

Social scientists have shown that labor unions helped to maintain economic inequality in check in the United States from about the 1950s until about the 1970s by, inter alia, using their once formidable resources to maintain a moral economy for labor. A moral economy is a package of social and...

We present a framework that incorporates both moral motivations and fairness considerations into utility. The main idea is that individuals face a preference trade-off between their material individual interest and their desire to follow moral norms. In our model, we assume that moral motivation...

The word ‘moral' used to denote upright behaviour and ‘moral' to denote certain authorial rights (droit moral), are homonyms: the things signified by the same signifier are different. Because Germany's moral rights equivalent is the personality right (Persönlichkeitsrecht), the German...

Dialogue and intellectual trade between Islamic economics and conventional economics has been active and mutually beneficial for more than 40 years. I present some concrete examples of this in the current paper. I then assess recent calls for a complete break of Islamic economics with...

Development has always been a fanciful word in the political lexicon of policy-makers and politicians at both local and international political affairs. Political leaders and policy-makers seek to authenticate their relevance in the public ambiance by making several speeches that are coded...

There is a leadership crisis in the United States and much of the world. The United States currently trails 19 other countries in stability as measured by the Fragile States Index. Psalm 72 was written by King David as he approached death. David's great accomplishment was establishing a powerful...