Consequentialism and utility functions or policies could in principle be about virtues and integrity as about hamburgers, but hamburgers are more legible and easier to administer.
Here’s one concrete way in which this isn’t true: one common simplifying assumption in economics is that goods are homogeneous, and therefore that you’re indifferent about who to buy from. However, virtuous behavior involves rewarding people you think are more virtuous (e.g. by preferentially buying things from them).
In other words, economics is about how agents interact with each other via exchanging goods and services, while virtues are about how agents interact with each other more generally.
It seems very reasonable to be indifferent about who ends up incentivising or exhibiting virtuous behaviors you care about (to be more prevalent in the world or your community), and the incentives don’t need to come in the form of personal action about who to buy other things from.
In other words, economics is about how agents interact with each other via exchanging goods and services, while virtues are about how agents interact with each other more generally.
If virtues and other abstract properties of behaviors are treated as particular examples of goods and services, then economics could discuss how agents obtain the presence of virtues or patterns of interaction between people, by paying businesses that specialize in manufacturing their presence in the world.
This does need a scalable enough business to merit the term that can produce marginal virtue and patterns of interactions by employing the existing economy, rearranging the physical world in a way that results in greater presence of these abstract goods in it, wielding fiat currency to move other goods and labor in the world to make this happen by paying other businesses and people who specialize in those goods and labor. Some of these other goods instrumentally effected through other businesses could themselves be virtues or patterns of interaction. Building economic engines that scale is very hard (successful startups reward founders and investors), doing this with illegible abstract goods is borderline impossible, but this is not a fundamentally different kind of activity.
I don’t see why using the word “virtue” magically solves the hardness of that math (the reasons why such assumptions are simplifying). Maybe that is what your promised formalizations are about, but I’m also kinda skeptical that reputation and consumers’ preference to trade with some groups over others is a subject that no economist could give reasonable models about.
Here’s one concrete way in which this isn’t true: one common simplifying assumption in economics is that goods are homogeneous, and therefore that you’re indifferent about who to buy from. However, virtuous behavior involves rewarding people you think are more virtuous (e.g. by preferentially buying things from them).
In other words, economics is about how agents interact with each other via exchanging goods and services, while virtues are about how agents interact with each other more generally.
It seems very reasonable to be indifferent about who ends up incentivising or exhibiting virtuous behaviors you care about (to be more prevalent in the world or your community), and the incentives don’t need to come in the form of personal action about who to buy other things from.
If virtues and other abstract properties of behaviors are treated as particular examples of goods and services, then economics could discuss how agents obtain the presence of virtues or patterns of interaction between people, by paying businesses that specialize in manufacturing their presence in the world.
This does need a scalable enough business to merit the term that can produce marginal virtue and patterns of interactions by employing the existing economy, rearranging the physical world in a way that results in greater presence of these abstract goods in it, wielding fiat currency to move other goods and labor in the world to make this happen by paying other businesses and people who specialize in those goods and labor. Some of these other goods instrumentally effected through other businesses could themselves be virtues or patterns of interaction. Building economic engines that scale is very hard (successful startups reward founders and investors), doing this with illegible abstract goods is borderline impossible, but this is not a fundamentally different kind of activity.
I don’t see why using the word “virtue” magically solves the hardness of that math (the reasons why such assumptions are simplifying). Maybe that is what your promised formalizations are about, but I’m also kinda skeptical that reputation and consumers’ preference to trade with some groups over others is a subject that no economist could give reasonable models about.