Teleology and Utilitarian Economics

Abstract

The preceding quotation from G. L. S. Shackle well articulates one of the most severe sources of confusion besetting methodologists in their attempt to resolve questions concerning the normative/descriptive status of economic theory, especially the theory of choice (CCT). On the one hand, constituting the prevailing “orthodoxy” among economic methodologists are those economists and philosophers of science who once again have endorsed principles of scientific method urged by logical positivists, a cardinal tenet of whom has been has been that of the “unity of method” between the natural and social sciences.² Hence, in conformity to what are taken to be “mechanistic models” of the natural sciences, it is argued that economic events such as consumer choices are explained by invoking causes comprised of “antecedent conditions” or events logically “external” and temporally prior to these events (effects). Or, more precisely, economic events are explained by deducing such items of behaviour from “ordinary” causal laws representing uniformities in such mechanistic sequences. In particular, thus, a mechanistic model of explanation would avoid any mention of the family of intentional entities consisting of the reasons, motives, goals, purposes, social conventions, moral principles, etc. for the sake of which, or in compliance with, the economic agent might be claimed to undertake his activity. As Jevons succinctly put this viewpoint in the last century, economic theory in general is to be conceived as a “mechanics of utility and self-interest.”³

Yet still in an explosively changing world, we have a fragmented economics... One reason for this goes deep. It is the lack of a philosophical basis for economic theory. Economic life is looked upon as deliberative action, and again it is looked upon as action determined by the combination of tastes and circumstances. Which is it? Can it be both? Nobody asks, and such problems being unrecognized, the diversity of hidden assumptions creates a babel of conflicting languages.¹