Debates surrounding the place of values and morality in economics are not new. The very phrase economic science implies a strongly positivist dimension to economics as the study of supply and demand. Wilhelm Rke (18991966), however, is one of a number of twentieth-century free market economists who explored the issue of the relationship between morality and economics in detail and in a manner that went far beyond the utility calculations to which some economists and others are inclined to reduce this question. Indeed the German title of Rkes most well-known work, A Humane Economy, was Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage [Beyond Supply and Demand] (1958).
Samuel Gregg, "A Value Judgment on A Value Judgment on Value Judgments," Journal of Markets & Morality 18, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 483-495.