Reinterpreting The Moral Economy – Building on the Economic Possibilities of Selflessness

The term moral economy has originally been used to describe agricultural communities with shared values and practices of economic justice. Its reinterpreted form, which this dissertation has arrived at, reflects a social system realising the economic potential of selflessness, which economies above subsistence levels, and at any scale, have the capacity to evolve into. Here, the moral economy becomes intertwined with moral economics, cultivation of economic science that involves the incorporation of ethical elements, not as value judgements and policy suggestions primarily, but as explicit building blocks of economic theories and models. The dissertation was written during a critical phase of the economic science and of the economy. Developed economies themselves, and the broader societal context in an interaction with technology, have been depicted as systems that – primarily through the economies and the mechanisms of algorithms – encorach on individual freedoms and human agency. Meanwhile, societies are unreasonably slow at imagining and acting upon desired forms and states of coexistence and progress. In the field of economics, internal scrutiny appears to have transgressed constructive levels. The connection between the moral economy and moral economics concepts is established in an unprecedentedly broad and systematic way, and the synthesis uncovers constructs hitherto undiscussed in economic science.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Hajnal, Zsófia

• Közgazdasági elméletek

Language dc:language

en