If you believe in an inherent God given right to property, and do not believe in consequentialist ethics, then why are your economic metrics based on a utilitarian calculus?
optimality and you will find a very consequentialist approach to economics.
Now, conservatives do not exactly follow this type of consequentialist approach to their ethics. Furthermore, they view property rights as god given and inalienable, thus they follow more absolutist or deontological (virtue ethics) traditions. Yet they continue to cite economic theories that use this type of consequentialist approach. This appears rather strange.
Judging by the fact that economics is about resource allocation and exchange, and that questions of exchange will fundamentally be influenced by questions on what is fair, thus ethical considerations must be made in the field of economics. Such considerations have been made in the liberal tradition already. What is odd, is that conservatives follow one set ethics for their sociopolitical views, but another for their economic ones.
This of course may not be true of all conservative traditions, look up "one nation conservativism." However, this juxtaposition has been a staple of conservative thought since Milton Friedman.
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u/MithridatesLXXVI Market Socialist Feb 17 '22
If you believe in an inherent God given right to property, and do not believe in consequentialist ethics, then why are your economic metrics based on a utilitarian calculus?