However,
value-free economics is not sufficient to promote a moral argument for a society.
However, Misesian praxeology and its
value-free economics is not enough to establish a moral argument for a free society.
A positive, value-free economics, in the sense of not relying on any particular set of value judgments or on any philosophical or psychological framework, is generally seen as ideal.
Drakopoulos, "Origins and Development of the Trend Towards Value-Free Economics," Journal of the History of Economic Thought 19, 2 (1997): 286.
In consequence she may give rise to the impression that Robbins aimed at faulting the normative application of interpersonal utility comparisons, the more so as she connects the dispute with the controversy about value-free economics.(5) Actually he judged this normative practice fully admissible and repeatedly recommended it as the correct one, provided its nature were clearly recognized.
(5.) Taking Harrod as an example, she alludes to economists who, demurring at Robbins's negative contention, "warned against the sterility of a value-free economics." Harrod defended, however, the possibility of interpersonal utility comparisons not in a normative, but in a factual sense [12, 396].
(For that matter, many of the ethical and epistemological points that Putnam wants to make can be found already in the ancient Greek philosophers; the first attack on
value-free economics, for example, was Plato's dialogue Hipparchus.)