The Evolution of Moral Science: Economic Rationality in the Complex Social System

Economics in the early 20th Century established distributive justice as the marginal productivity theory of income distribution. As the system has evolved, however, the distributive principle has been lost as a result of the structural change of the production process. Faced with “casino capitalism” or the “winner-take-all” society, instead of the classic distributive justice, a lottery system dominates income distribution. Orthodox economics prefers a set of particular rationalities, e.g., the so-called game theoretic views, instead of the general rationality. These particular rationalities are examined in some detail and their failures are argued. Rationality, either in general or in a particular form, is not to be regarded as a panacea in the complex socio-economic system.