How to conduct inter-/multi-disciplinary research as an economist?

My economics dissertation, "The Economics of Moral Uncertainty," represents my triptych's third panel addressing moral uncertainty. This intricate choice-processing problem asks, "What should we do when uncertain about what we should do?"

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I. The Phenomenology of Moral Uncertainty

The triptych's opening segment, "The Phenomenology of Moral Uncertainty," a manuscript resulting from my undergraduate and graduate endeavors at AMSE, LSE, and Sorbonne, draws upon the history of modern moral philosophy, philosophy of economics, and phenomenology. It examines the origins and characterizations of moral uncertainty, both as a conceptual construct and a lived human experience, offering hypotheses for its genesis and potential responses and emphasizing the seminal role of critical thinking.

The Phenomenology of Moral Uncertainty, by Antony Avram

The key findings from this first stage posit that moral uncertainty has been a perennial concern in the history of moral philosophy, a natural existential phenomenon arising innately within human nature, and that critical thinking offers a promising heuristic for its management.

II. Operationalizing Moral Uncertainty

The second panel of this triptych, my humanities-focused doctoral research at Sorbonne, titled "Operationalizing Moral Uncertainty," delves further into these findings.

This work leverages the philosophy of science and of economics, contemporary ethics, and an interdisciplinary survey methodology to shape a framework for the reasoning rules and values underpinning critical thinking. It articulates the necessary welfare economic assumptions for comparing values and knowledge under moral uncertainty. Despite its metaphysical roots, this study sheds light on the essential trade-offs for its future operational exploration in testable social sciences. A comprehensive mixed-method survey provides preliminary evidence for the "experience of moral uncertainty," underscoring its relevance to economists and sketching the rigorous methodologies requisite for future validation of this phenomenon as a fact.

This second panel culminates in the understanding that moral uncertainty can be operationally conceived as a choice-processing phenomenon, that pragmatic welfare assumptions are a pre-requisite, and that despite challenges of capturing moral uncertainty through conventional incentive mechanisms, investigating its correlations with other choice phenomena and forging novel empirical methodologies may prove advantageous. These three pillars collectively pave the way for examining moral uncertainty through economic models within an enhanced revealed preference framework.

III. The Economics of Moral Uncertainty

The final panel, my doctoral dissertation in economics at PSE, builds upon these pillars to explore moral uncertainty's economic and policy implications, utilizing methodologies from experimental economics, behavioral political economy, and behavioral macroeconomics.

Chapter 1 explores a phenomenon correlated with moral uncertainty established in the humanities dissertation's survey component, inherent ambiguity aversion, by designing an incentivized experiment to test the extent to which individuals exhibit ambiguity aversion, regardless of how good or bad ambiguous situations can be for them.

Chapter 2 designs an incentivized experiment to elicit critical thinking under moral uncertainty, encapsulating it within a testable behavioral model and exploring its political economy implications.

Chapter 3 models the role of moral uncertainty in climate change, delineating the critical welfare economic assumptions necessary for its incorporation into climate-macroeconomic modeling.

Through this triptych built over four years, coupled with my multidisciplinary education as an economist, I hope to show how interests across diverse disciplines and methodologies can be harmoniously integrated without sacrificing the necessary scientific methodology when establishing a social fact and exploring the economic policy implications of a phenomenon. In particular, I hope to show how the humanities can be a fertile ground for imagining potential societal futures and how economics can serve as a robust scientific safeguard and toolset for discerning feasible and safe societal directions based on scientific interventions and evidence.