Christliche Sozialethik und das Wertproblem in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften

The article demonstrates that natural law devices of justifying norms, as they are developed in Christian Social Ethics, are in principle compatible with economic methodology. In particular, it is argued that moral scepticism dominating nowadays’ economics which denies the existence of objective, godgiven norms is untenable for logical reasons. For those reasons Karl Popper’s critical rationalist methdology is being inconsistently applied with respect to justifying norms. From an epistemological point of view the conflict between economic subjectivism and moral objectivism in Christian Social Ethics is undecidable. It is therefore finally analysed how Karl Popper personally thought about this question: surprisingly, Popper obviously had an objectivist notion of norms and sympathesized with Christian natural law teaching.