Dic & terms: Moral science

자료 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_science (as of April 23, 2013)

( ... ) The term moral science was used by Hume in his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals to refer to the systematic study of human nature and relationships. ( ... ) A variety of early thinkers in the humanistic sciences took up Hume's direction. Adam Smith, for example, conceived of economics as a moral science in the Humean sense.[6] ( ... ) Dilthey brought nineteenth-century attempts to formulate a methodology appropriate to the humanistic sciences together with Hume's term "moral science", which he translated as Geisteswissenschaft - a term with no exact English equivalent. Dilthey attempted to articulate the entire range of the moral sciences in a comprehensive and systematic way.[7] Meanwhile, his conception of “Geisteswissenschaften” encompasses also the abovementioned study of classics, languages, literature, music, philosophy, history, religion, and the visual and performing arts. He characterized the scientific nature of a study as depending upon:[7]

자료 2: Economics as a Moral Science (Kenneth E. Boulding, AER 1969)

( ...) Nevertheless, for many economists the very term "moral science" will seem like a contradiction. We are strongly imbued today with the view that science should be ^wertfrei^(value free) and we believe that science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgement and has only bee able to take off into the vast universe of the "is" by escaping from the treacherous launching pad of the "ought."  ( ... ) Let me expain, then, what I mean by moral and by moral science. A moral, or ethical proposition, is a statement about a rank order of preference among alternatives, which is intended to apply to more than one person. A preference which applies to one person only is a "taste." Statements of this kind are often called "value judgments." ( ... ) A moreal proposition then is a "common value."

Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values.

( ... ... )

Let us return then to economics as a moral science, not merely in the sense in which all science is "affected with an ethical interest," but in the quite specific sense of asking whether economics itself can be of assistance in resolving ethical disputes, especially those which arise out of the continued increase of knowledge.