Editorial

Citation

(2007), "Editorial", Humanomics, Vol. 23 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/h.2007.12423baa.001

Editorial

The theme of ethics and economics is neither a new one nor a one-dimensional study of linear phenomena otherwise covered in neoclassical economics by the calculus of optimization, resource allocation and steady-state equilibrium, while being given a shape of dynamics in time as datum only. Social interaction that otherwise bears the hallmark of complex behavior in ethics and economics is not within the purview of mainstream economic doctrinaire. Economic methodology does not treat the dynamics by process and organism. This has remained foreign to evolutionary economics as well, as optimization behavior with rationality is still the core of evolutionary economic thinking.

It rings a phrase from Alexander Gray who said that economics be a science serves to uncover its peculiar brand of the scientific approach by ignoring the normative perspectives of reality and existence. Such scientific treatment has been a debility to both scientific and socioeconomic analyses.

Ethico-economics, which is within the field of Humanomics as a broader systemic study of ethics now taken as endogenous phenomenon in socio-scientific inquiry with its effects in institutionalism and policy making, goes further than normative thinking. Its domain is to spell out and apply normative visions of reality to all possible applications.

The consequences are both a scientific research program to ethicize hard core scientific investigation, methodology and social studies encompassing economics, science and society and to open doors to new forms of complex analytics. Consequently, the methodology on which Humanomics rests is different from that of received social and scientific disciplines – the socio-scientific world. This new methodology is unique, upon which all interdisciplinary inquiry is erected, despite the diversity of issues and problems that different disciplines and situations encounter in their own right.

The methodology of Humanomics is thus itself the first great domain of revolutionary inquiry. We categorize it within the post-modern questioning that inquires about a new epistemological revision of socio-scientific investigation and outlook, and thereby the worldview. Its penetrating inroads into socio-scientific inquiry form both a novel and revolutionary paradigmatic challenge. Like several other recent developments on scientific epistemology and their new findings and ways of looking at our universe, so also the project of unity of knowledge as the universal of Humanomics, opens up a vista of new dimensions in challenging new scientific queries involving the formalism of ethics as an endogenous force in socio-scientific thinking, modeling and application.

There is a vast diversity involved here. The papers presented in this issue of HIJSE reflect this viewpoint.