Integrating the Economic Concept of a “Merit Good” Used to Justify the Teaching of Ethics Across the University Curriculum: Revisiting Musgrave’s Perspective | Chapter 2 | New Advances in Business, Management and Economics Vol. 9

 

Economic theory divides economic events into private goods and public goods. The Harvard professor Richard Musgrave introduced in 1956 the concept of merit goods because he discovered that there were several economic events which did not fit the definition of either private or public goods. Musgrave reports “free hospitals for the poor or public subsidies to low-cost housing (Musgrave1956, 340). Later, he added free education as an additional merit good and penalty taxation, as in the case of liquor as a demerit good. As his career developed, Musgrave added even more economic events to his category of merit goods (Ver Eecke 2007, 36, footnote 4).

 

Musgrave himself introduced several justifications for society imposing merit and demerit goods upon the members of the free market. One justification provided by Musgrave was an ethical justification (Ver Eecke 2007, 39).

 

In this paper, the authors use the concept of (de)merit goods to argue that economic reality has an ethical dimension. Hence, a philosophical reflection upon economics can be an opportunity to introduce students to ethical questions. We also present the content of such a course, which one of the authors has given.

 

Author(s) Details

Wilfried Ver Eecke
Philosophy Department, Georgetown University, USA.

 

Mark Nowacki
Singapore Management University, Singapore.

 

 

Please see the book here:- https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/nabme/v9/5777