Hijacking your thread again. Please tell me to stop when it's a problem.

Today I read a piece that got me to thinking about ethics and economics, but really I've been thinking about the subject ever since you introduced me to Buddhist economics. The piece today revolves around this news:

Lt. Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer, a US Army psychologist who ordered the illegal torture of a juvenile, Mohammad Jawad, invoked her right not to incriminate herself and refused to testify in the case of Mohammad Jawad. bmaz is filling in at Emptywheel while Marcy Wheeler, the regular proprietor of the blog, winds her way to the Democratic National Convention as a road trip vacation with her husband.

Zierhoffer is the first psychologist to refuse to testify in the Gitmo trials, but probably not the last. In any case the involvement of psychologists in torture has become a subject of interest for the American Psychological Association, especially after the publication of Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals earlier this summer. bmaz's post also points out how the American Anthropological Association is concerned about ethics in regard to anthropologist involved in Human Terrain Teams.

Social scientists have long been concerned about ethics. Psychologists and anthropologists can cause direct harm to persons or groups of people, and ethical guidelines have been fashioned to prevent or minimize such harm. No one would argue that an economist cannot cause harm to people. But the types of havoc an economist might wreck seems much less "personal" than for psychologists and anthropologists.

In my own personal news thread, "Our Own Metaphor," I've been discussing a book on a 1968 conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation. In the 1991 afterword, Mary Catherine Bateson discusses her father's reluctance to endorse action to effect change. M. C. Bateson believes that his rejection comes out of Gregory Bateson's experiences in WWII working in psychological warfare. M.C. Bateson's mother, Margret Mead did too, but was far less reticient about encouraging action against environmental and human problems.

bmaz's post references a rather narrow ethical problem, basically: Is it ethical for a psychologist to use her training and methods to systematically harm a person by directing torture? Or Is it ethical for an anthropologist to use his training and methods to identify persons for disappearance and subjected to torture? Understandably, the professional associations have a few qualms about the propriety of this sort of stuff for their profession.

The discussions about ethics and social science during WWII were sometimes public, for example the Conferences on Science, Philosophy and Religion, and the scope of the discussions broader.

I'm probably just ignorant, but I don't know of many discussions among economists about ethics with similar breadth happening presently. Thinking about it the discussions between Jeffery Sachs and William Easterly along with other interested parties seems to qualify somewhat. But these discussions seem more about policy than ethics. It's as if there is a presumed ethical agreement underlying most Western economic thinking so no questions about ethics are needed. One exception is Joseph Stiglitz, at least in Google searches combining economics + ethics his name come up a lot.

Ethics, Economic Advice, and Economic Policy by Stiglitz is an example of the sort of paper combining ethics and economics I should think there should be more of.

I like policy discussions. But it strikes me as odd to find so few articles on economics which address ethics. I do hope that debates among members of the APA and AAA about ethical parameters of psychologists and anthropologists in the terror wars gets some attention. I also hope that such debate might cross over to economics.

There's a short take on Easterly and Sachs at Ethnograph.com (scroll down a little) entitled "Jeffery Sachs, William Easterly and Bronislaw Malinowski???" The author draws a distinction from Malinowski's ethnographic work between subsistence ethics and impersonal market ethics:

[I]t is questionable whether encouraging hoe-wielding farmers embedded in subsistence ethics to compete in maize markets with price-setting Iowa agri-business is an effective poverty alleviation strategy. The capitalist Iowa farmer, and the Tanzanian subsistence farmer reflect fundamentally different types of social organization and attitude towards markets. Just ask Malinowski.

Economic ethics is central to Buddhist Economics and the discussion of ethics is makes Buddhist Economics very relevant to the advancement of economics in the West.