Unself-consciously Christian

Andrew Yuengert Pepperdine University

Unself-consciously Christian Scholarship

Speech given at Lilly Conference on Faith and Learning at Pepperdine, March 2001

Andrew Yuengert

Several weeks ago Richard described, in writing, the talk I am going to give, and he wrote the following: "Andy Yuengert, describing his research project, which quite self-consciously relates the discipline of economics to the moral imperatives of the Christian faith."

This description surprised me in many ways. What I find most striking, most surprising, is the adverb "self-consciously." I don’t think of my work as "self-consciously Christian." I think a better description of it would be "unself-consciously Christian," since the connections between my faith and the decisions I make as a researcher seem to me to be very natural and unforced. I am a Christian, seeking a better understanding of certain propositions in economics, in philosophy, and in theology. There is nothing notable – at least there should be nothing notable – about a Christian going about the search for truth as a Christian, making use of the resources available to him as a Christian and as a human being. Indeed, it is notable – at least, it should be notable – that a Christian should conduct research that is "self-consciously non-Christian," as if a Christian should not make use of every resource available to him in the pursuit of truth.

Of course, I have not always felt this way. I was trained to be a "self-consciously secular" economist. It is a tribute to Pepperdine’s openness to both faith and reason that I find my former training a bit puzzling, as if I was a bird trained to fly with only one of my wings.

I want to describe my research project, but I also want to describe how I came to it, because the story how I came to where I am now will highlight some of the difficulties of integrating faith and scholarship in the academe, and will point out the value of Pepperdine’s openness to just such an integration.

I began my undergraduate career at West Point, training to become an army officer. I was not sure that I wanted to be an officer, but I was not attracted to any alternative careers. I took my first economics course during my second year, and immediately fell in love with it. Economics appeared to make clear what had before seemed mysterious – the movements of interest rates, the arguments for free markets, the justifications for and arguments against government intervention in economic affairs. I abandoned West Point, abandoned my army career, and determined to become an economist.

Now my love for the truth, and my joy at seeming to have found it in economics, was not uniquely Christian, but in me it expressed itself in a uniquely Christian way, and it immediately created a peculiarly Christian conflict. This was the early eighties, and the US Bishops were preparing a draft document on economics which seemed to contradict the truths I was learning in economics class.

I had never been taught explicitly that all truth was one, and that no truth could really contradict another, but I had absorbed this conviction from my upbringing in the Church. I had also absorbed the conviction that I was part of a faith community under the leadership of a bishop, and that one of the roles of the bishop was to safeguard and proclaim the truths of the faith. I knew that bishops might be wrong about economics, but I was not free to dismiss their writings as the unrealistic musings of well-meaning non-economists.

My three convictions – 1) that membership in the body of Christ demanded that I grant a certain weight to the statements of bishops, 2) that economics contained certain truths about the economy that seemed to be at odds with bishop’s statements, and 3) that all truth was one, convinced me to pursue an integration of economics and Christian ethics in further study. It was never a purely academic pursuit – it flowed naturally out of my desire to integrate economics, which I loved, and the truths of my faith, which I loved.

Because most of the Christian writers on economics were not economists, I determined to get a Ph.D. in economics, and then explore the relationship between ethics and economics in my research.

Five years later I completed my Ph.D., but faced a disconcerting problem – I had been so well trained in the science of economics that I could no longer perceive any relationship between ethical reflection and economics. The irony of my predicament was not lost on me. I had been taught that economics had no ethical content, that it concerned itself solely with "what is" – observed behavior, the properties of certain mathematical models – and not with "what should be." I had not lost my conviction that the revealed truths of the faith had an important bearing on the conduct of my discipline, but I had been stripped of the intellectual tools necessary to discern the connections, and to reconcile faith and reason. I was in an intellectual bind.

I was in a professional bind, too. By training I was a labor economist, an expert in immigration economics and empirical research, but I aspired to work on the boundary between economics and ethics. Very few schools would hire a labor economist to do this sort of integrative work – research universities (understandably) wanted me to teach in the fields in which I had been trained, and integrative work was thought to be "too soft" – it was not considered real economics. Smaller colleges would allow me to branch out, but required teaching loads that were too daunting.

When I found Pepperdine I was a full-time financial researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, unable to pursue my true love, and contemplating leaving the field of economics and becoming a banker or a regulator.

I made no bones about my desire to pursue research into Catholic social ethics and economics when I interviewed with Pepperdine, and I believe that my interests counted in my favor. At Pepperdine I have been encouraged to pursue them. This space has been given to me because my research fits the Christian mission of the school. Because Pepperdine affirms that truth has nothing to fear from relentless pursuit, it is particularly open to interdisciplinary inquiry and to the integration of faith and reason.

I want to emphasize that this Christian mission, and the integration of faith and reason, has widespread support among the faculty. I was not hired by religion professors, or by administrators, but by business and economics professors, none of whom was pursuing this sort of integration, but who were nevertheless supportive of it. At Pepperdine I have been able to pursue my longstanding interest in ethics and economics, and for that I am very grateful.

My current research focuses on two questions :

1. How is the separation of ethics from economics justified in economics?

2. How might Christian ethics and economics be related to each other?

Most contemporary arguments for the ethics-economics split in economics rely on a 1932 essay by Lionel Robbins, which introduced positivism into mainstream economic analysis. Robbins declared that an "unbridgeable gulf" lay between ethics and economics. His essay defined the terms in which positive concerns ("scientific" statements about "what is") and normative concerns (statements about what "should be") are still expressed in economics.

The language of Robbins’ positive-normative distinction combines Hume’s fact-value distinction and the moral theory of emotivism. The fact-value split is a claim that moral conclusions cannot be deduced solely from statements of fact : "ought" cannot be derived from "is." Emotivism treats all moral judgments as matters of taste, beyond reasonable discussion. The deep gulf that was opened between ethical reflection and economic analysis by the adoption of the fact-value split and emotivism makes it difficult for mainstream economists to see any connection between ethics and economics.

The Robbins’ essay was enormously influential. As is often the case with papers which mark intellectual turning points, all previous economic thought on the relationship of ethics to economics has since been treated as a prelude to Robbins’ insights. Senior, Ricardo, Mill, and Keynes are interpreted as closet positivists.

In seeking an alternative to positivism, I naturally looked to Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, since my Catholic influences were Dominican, and much of what the Popes have had to say about economics employs Thomistic categories.

Aristotle proposed the first separation between positive and normative inquiry, by distinguishing three separate faculties of the intellect : theory (science), art, and prudence (practical judgement). Each faculty is distinguished by its object: respectively, truth (what is), making, and action (what one should do). Although each of these three modes of human reason is different enough to require separate canons of practice, the first two (theory and art) are integrally related to prudence, because prudence, being concerned with what one should or should not do, governs the use of the other modes of reason. The highest form of prudence is politics, which is concerned with the actions of those who govern.

The Aristotelian, and later Thomistic, frameworks imply a limited but real autonomy for economics - a complete independence would be counterproductive, since economics needs guidance if it is to help and not hinder the attainment of the higher ends which are the object of ethics/prudence. In the Aristotelian framework, the justification for some independence for economics is based, not only on the different natures of theoretical and prudential reasoning, but on the value of specialization - economics can produce more useful insights if it is left to develop its own inner logic, to focus more closely on part of social reality (exchange, e.g.). This independence must not become absolute, since the independence of economics is supposed to serve the ends of ethics, whose nature economics is incapable of determining by itself.

The great surprise of my research has been to find vestiges of this Thomistic conception of the relations between ethics and economics in the writings of nineteenth century economists. Few of the nineteenth-century economic philosophers questioned the integral relationship of economics and ethics; they employed even the language of Aristotle, referring to the realm of ethical reflection as the field of "politics" or "legislation." Because the Thomistic conception of the ethics-economics relationship was conventional in the nineteenth century, it stands as a practical alternative to the current positivist orthodoxy of Robbins, and offers a more nuanced view of the ethical nature of economics.

I hope to explain, for an audience of economists, the Thomistic conception of the ethics-economics relationship, with a view towards a clearer picture of the effect of value judgments on economic analysis. The final product will be a book. I have begun this project, which is unfolding along several dimensions.

First, it is a work of the philosophy of economics. Drawing on classical and Thomistic sources, I will outline the Thomistic account of human action, and place within that framework the actions of economists going about their work. Because economists are goal-oriented, and the goals they seek are thought by them to be good, their actions in pursuit of their goals are by their nature moral, and the worthiness of their goals has strict implications for economic practice in pursuit of those goals.

Second, it is a work of the history of economics. Several economic philosophers have recently made the point that the ethics-economics distinction need not be founded on the fact-value split. If the distinction is not founded on the fact-value split, then on what principle is it founded? The answer to this questions lies in the history of economic thought. The fact-value distinction is a latecomer in economics – it did not establish itself in the consciousness of economics until the early twentieth century, when Robbins heralded its arrival. Economists talked in various ways about the distinction between ethics and economic analysis for at least a century before Robbins. Recent defenses of the normative-positive distinction fit neatly into the Aristotelian framework.

Thirdly, I hope to produce several examples of ways in which ethics – particularly Catholic Social Ethics, which has Aristotelian roots - can profoundly affect economic analysis. For example, the Catholic conception of the good toward which economies should aim is much richer than the economic conception of the good to be pursued, and as such implies a richer set of assumptions for economic analysis. Christian personalism, which paints a richer portrait of the person, who needs society for moral formation, and whose passions may dominate reason in choice, leads to richer and more complex criteria by which to measure the value of the social outcomes commonly analyzed by economists. For example, in a recent paper, "The Common Good for Economists," I describe the difficulties that economics has in accommodating Catholic notions of the common good. In another paper, "Catholic Social Teaching on the Economics of Immigration," I examine recent economics research on immigration from the perspective of Catholic Social Teaching, which offers a critique of the direction of immigration research.

The impact of this project will, I hope, not be limited to economics. The separation of economics from ethics is an instance of a more widespread modern condition : the separation between ethics and "technique" in general. Economics is not the only intellectual pursuit which ignores ethics (even the field of moral philosophy takes pains to distinguish itself from "moralism"), and many modern "arts" (management science and medicine, for example) assert a radical independence from ethical reflection. Because economics has separated itself from ethics more starkly than other fields, the construction of a practical critique of the ethics-economics split will have immediate application to several other social science and humanities disciplines.

I am comfortable calling my work "Christian scholarship," but I am hard put to identify anything uniquely Christian about my research. It draws on what is sometimes called the Christian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, but one does not have to be a Christian to find the Thomistic elements in my work compelling. My research draws on Catholic reflections on the common good and virtue, neither of which are uniquely Christian. The interdisciplinary nature of my work is not unique to Christian scholarship; neither is the love of truth that motivates it. None of the parts of my research is uniquely Christian, but I’m suspicious of the term "uniquely Christian," – it is often treated as if it were the opposite of "uniquely human," as if anything Christian cannot possibly be human at the same time.

You can judge whether or not this research is Christian or not – my dirty little secret is that I do not particularly care. All I know is that Pepperdine has made it possible, and I suspect that it made it possible because of its Christian mission, which includes a desire to pursue truth relentlessly.

Because of Pepperdine’s Christian commitment, it is open to the sorts of integration that Christian scholarship requires. When I say Pepperdine is committed to this work, I mean not only the administrators, but most importantly the faculty. Even those who are engaged in specialized fields support this work. I don’t believe I could be doing this sort of work without their support.