 |
Interdisciplinary Courses | ||||||||
Ethics and Economics
|
|||||||||
Doug Hicks Associate Professor of Leadership Studies and Religion University of Richmond |
|
Jonathan Wight Associate Professor of Economics and International Studies University of Richmond |
|
|
|
|
This course was designed to prepare students of economics, business and leadership studies for positions of responsibility in a complex and interdisciplinary world. It made use of insights students learned in two previous courses, Principles of Economics and Foundations of Leadership Studies. The concepts and frameworks of microeconomics served as tools in our analysis, and they were also subjects of that analysis. Concepts of leadership, including ethical ideas, similarly serve as both tools and subjects of our analysis. In the most basic sense, learning any discipline (whether it be accounting, finance or biology) without attention to how values-based assumptions are made leaves students ill-prepared for critical thinking about real world problems. Ethics matters in the evaluation of economic and business outcomes and governmental policies.
Public policy choices usually entail trade-offs between intersecting and conflicting moral demands (e.g., between efficiency and equity). Economics students will be stronger economists when they are able to understand and model ethical approaches within positive economic models. Beyond this, students should understand the ethical premises that ground economic thinking (e.g., the ethical precepts needed to define efficiency). By the same token, students from leadership studies or other disciplines lacking an understanding of how markets allocate resources using decentralized prices will be hampered in formulating public policy solutions. Leaders need literacy in economics and ethics in order to clarify various policy-based and other public choices.
 |
||
|
||
|
||
