In economics, issues of science, technology, and ethics are more diverse than in any other scientific or technological discipline. In the first instance, like all the sciences, economics is both dependent on and independent of ethics. Its methods involve internal commitments of an ethical character (e.g., truth telling) but are subject to external ethical oversight (e.g., with regard to the proper treatment of human participants in empirical research). At the same time, as the entry on "Economics and Ethics" points out, the content of the science may have ethical implications in ways that physics, for instance, does not.

In the second instance, insofar as economics constitutes a technique or technology, it may provide guidance for how to achieve externally determined ends. As such it exhibits multiple interactions with various ethical, legal, and policy perspectives. Such interactions are referenced in entries such as those on...