A Scholar's Quest

摘要

Modern portrayals of human action are overwhelmingly in a calculative and consequentialist tradition. Consequen-tialist reasoning is the basis for most of modern social and behavioral science and preeminently for economics. Action is seen as choice, and choice is seen as driven by anticipations, incentives, and desires. These ideas trace their roots at least to the Greeks, owe substantial parts of their modern manifestation to the formulations of Jeremy Bentham, and derive much of their contemporary power from the geniuses of L. J. Savage and John von Neumann. It is no surprise that schools of applied economics (or business) teach such a consequentialist theology as a sacred doctrine and also address their own problems of decision and strategy in the same spirit. They evaluate their alternatives in terms of expected consequences, implement strategies with expected outcomes that appear attractive, and seek to manage the actions of others by assuming they are similarly guided. Such practices honor ideas that are of enormous importance in human development. It is inconceivable that we would abandon them.