Economic Man as a Moral Individual

We propose a concrete method for including moral concerns in preferences. In our framework, the agent maximizes utility subject to constraints, but the utility from consuming a specific commodity bundle varies in a “lumpy” or “discontinuous” way with the concurrent moral content of the individual's behavior. Our method also indicates how constraints vary with this moral content. Our approach seems more intuitively appealing than several competing frameworks, and can be used to explain a number of otherwise puzzling phenomena. ( JEL D11, A13)