We have shown that both in the case of microeconomics emanating from the classical and neo-classical economic thought and macroeconomics from Keynesianism, the integration of ethics into economic values and market exchange remained a central focus. Yet such a goal defied the scientific methodologies of these schools. Ethics and economics were indeed epistemologically thought to be inseparable in all of economic thought from the very beginning. The problem of blending the two appeared due to the absence of what we claimed is a process-based systemic explanation of the social, economic and scientific universe. A substantive methodology of process orientation could otherwise have integrated and unified ethics with the purely economic elements. 

The problem that economics has always encountered is therefore one of rendering a socio-scientific paradigm that can treat ethics in it as an endogenous value element with the full force of a substantive scientific analysis (Bohr 1985,Einstein undated). In other words, epistemologically once again, we are searching for a worldview that would unify the knowledge premises of all disciplines according to a systemic framework of interactions, convergence and creative emergence.

In recent times feverish search has been launched for such a paradigm. We are not to lose sight of Herbert Simon�s classical book, Models of Man (1957). There is also the Austrian economic orientation in innovative development that was particularly mastered by Schumpeter (1934), but which faded with the coming of the new-classicical concept of market catalysis in Hayek�s work (1976). Such systemic learning-by-doing ways of re-thinking economic processes are once again occupying increasing interest in recent times (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Kirzner 1997). 

The birth of evolutionary economics followed the works of Boulding (1967, 1968). The main thrust of these studies is in the direction of explaining dis-equilibrium, chaotic and even equilibrium-converging models of social reality. Yet recent literature on evolutionary economics could not disentangle itself from neo-classical economic methodology (Nelson & Winter 1982). Hence a substantive theory of knowledge in economic change is fading away from evolutionary economics under the neo-classical influence. Recently, the social contractarian approach of Buchanan (1975), Buchanan & Tollison (1972) and the historistic economic studies propounded by North (1981) have also tied our attention to the search by the economic academia for a process-oriented explanation of economics, society, institution, politics and constitution (Choudhury 1998a) 

Sen�s Ethics and Economics

Among the very important contributions given to the field of ethics and economics are by Sen (1990). Of particular interest are Sen�s philosophical writings in re-orientating social welfare and social choice theories in the direction of explaining economic preferences that can be functionally determined by ethics. Here Sen ventures in examining how individual preferences can be formulated by imputing the sense of rights and duties in them (deontological) and thus explaining the consequences of such rights and duty bound preferences in market exchange (consequentialism). Sen�s ideas of social well-being are premised on such deontological consequentialism ans examined analytically. The social and interactive aspects of studying such preference formulation by analytical methods are evident in Sen words (1990, p. 75): "To get an overall assessment of the ethical standing of an activity it is necessary not only to look at its instrumental role and its consequences on other things, i.e. to examine the various intrinsically valuable or disvaluable consequences that this activity may have. What was called the �engineering� aspect of economics has a parallel within ethics itself. It may not be as central in many ethical problems as it is in mainstream economics, but it can be important enough."

What is then the methodological problem with these more recent attempts in explaining ethico-economic integration in the light of a systems orientation? An answer to this question is found in noting that the neo-classical assumptions of bounded economic rationality remains intrinsic in the postulates of social choice, welfare economics, institutional economics and public choice theory. Along the line of academic discourse launched by Sen and several philosophers, most notably Rawls (1971), Nozick (1971) and Dworkin (1978) in recent times; Kant (1964), Hume (1992), Husserl (1965) and Hegel (1956) of an earlier vintage, there remains a lack of substantiating the premise of a fundamental epistemology explaining unity of knowledge pertaining to ethico-economics. 

The social and economic doctrines referred to here are left instead to a concept of unity that breeds on the rationality perspectives of mental plurality, or else there exists no essential premise to foundationally define the episteme of unity of knowledge. New quests are today appearing in the intellectual domain of unity of knowledge in the physical sciences, but to date the inquiries have been limited to the unification of physical reality alone and that too without definite success (Barrow 1991, Hawking 1988). On the other side, the classical works on unity of the sciences could not establish a fundamentally pervasive methodology for the sciences (Neurath et al 1970, Nagel 1961). In economic theory we find the dichotomy of economic reasoning, inference, perception, price level and output between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Such a methodological dichotomy is also the case with the ideas of large scale and small scale universes of theoretical physics.

The idea of plurality as a necessity but posing a deep problem of measurement and harmonization of methodology can be found in Sen�s works. Sen finds unacceptable problem with a unified or �monist� scientific approach. He writes in this regard with a view of rejecting the idea of �monist� unity (Sen 1990, p.62): "Not only is there a unified and complete view of ethical goodness (weighing the different objects of value vis-�-vis each other), but even the objects of value must be all of the same type (singular and homogeneous) in this �monist� conception."