Can the categorical imperative rescue economics?

One of Kant’s most important ideas was the categorical imperative, which states that:

“an action is morally right if it can be willed to become a universal law that applies to all rational beings. In other words, an action is morally right if it can be consistently applied to everyone without contradiction or exception.”

In studying conventional or orthodox economics it is very noticeable that the emphasis is on the individual and on selfishness (exactly as Adam Smith intended); the categorical imperative is a kind of opposite of this so I wondered how such a fundamentally contradictory and altruistic notion might be applied in the field which arguably has the most effect on our lives, and very often a very negative one if you are poor. I offer first what AI* says about the matter (with my emboldening emphasis) and then a few comments of my own.

In economics, the categorical imperative can be applied in various ways. One way it can be applied is in the decision-making process of individuals and firms. For example, when making a decision about how to allocate resources, an individual or firm may consider whether the decision could be consistently applied to everyone without contradiction or exception. This could involve considering the long-term consequences of the decision, including its potential impact on the common good or the welfare of others.

The categorical imperative can also be applied to the development of economic policies and regulations. For example, policymakers may consider whether a particular policy or regulation could be consistently applied to all individuals and firms without contradiction or exception, and whether it would promote the common good or the welfare of all members of society.

Overall, the categorical imperative can be a useful tool in economics for considering the ethical implications of economic decisions and policies and for promoting fairness and justice in economic systems.

The categorical imperative sounds like it would be an excellent idea to apply to economics because orthodox economists are very clearly actively terrible at considering long-term consequences, the climate crisis being perhaps the most obvious example, and the common good or welfare of others is never considered by normal, neoliberal corporations ruled by the Friedman/Hayek notion that the only purpose of a corporation is to deliver maximum profits to shareholders, which usually involves socialising the costs onto the public and the rest of nature.

Thinking of policymakers, it is hard to find any on the Right, the ones mostly in power, or even from the centre-left, who are remotely interested in promoting the common good or the welfare of all members of society, especially as many of those of the Right don’t even believe in society – as Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987, “There is no such thing as society”. And if there was any left, she was determined to destroy as much of it as possible.

As for promoting fairness and justice in economic systems, as the number of billionaires and the amount of wealth they control reaches truly obscene levels, and as nurses and many other vital frontline workers have to forage in food banks to feed themselves and their families, it is pretty clear that mainstream economics doesn’t care about fairness or justice.

This brings me to two salient questions:

1) How would the categorical imperative be applied to economics in practice?

and

2) if the categorical imperative were applied to economics, would it not just be a sticking plaster on a system which is fundamentally flawed and not reformable, and like all sticking plasters, after a short while, it will come off?

Tomorrow I shall see what AI has to say about these interesting questions.

*OpenAI’s GPT3 chatbot