SOURCE: "Keynes's View of Economics as a Moral Science," in Keynes and Philosophy: Essays on the Origin of Keynes's Thought, edited by Bradley W. Bateman and John B. Davis, Edward Elgar, 1991, pp. 89-103.

In the following excerpt, Davis discusses Keynes's understanding of economic method in terms of his philosophical beliefs, focusing on his conception of economics as a moral science and his emphasis on the role of individual value judgments in the construction of economic models. J. M. Keynes's theoretical understanding of economic method is one of the less well understood dimensions of his thought, both because Keynes's thinking, unlike that of most economists, was motivated by serious reflection on philosophical questions, and because Keynes's particular philosophical heritage—rooted as it was in early reflections on the philosopher G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica—was quite different from that of other Cambridge economists. Accordingly, although Keynes repeated the Cambridge...