Empirical Identification of the Moral Assumptions Embedded within a Seminal Economic Text: Capitalism and Freedom

Social psychologists have recognised that moral intuitions shape perspectives, fuelling affective polarisation, including on supposedly fact-driven topics. This article explores influential economic ideas through the lens of moral psychology. It delivers the first empirical, inductive description of moral assumptions in a seminal economic text, Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (1962), by systematically qualifying instances of implicit and explicit moral evaluation according to evaluative linguistic principles and frequency analysis. It identifies the salient moral themes as: freedom in various forms, law and order, and competition, whilst centralised control, coercion and discrimination are judged as most immoral. Moral Foundations Theory is used to interpret the findings, highlighting the non-traditional moral judgments expressed in the text. The implications for both polarised economic discourse and theoretical understandings of morality are explored.