28 March 2025If we are trying to reconcile morality and rational behavior in economics, one worthy approach is to postulate that individuals are ‘rational in value’ (or ‘axiological rational’), as defined by Weber/Boudon. In many circumstances, people choose an action because they think it’s the ‘right thing’ to do without focusing exclusively on its consequences. The aim of this article is to identify in the recent history of economic ideas which approaches seem best suited to modeling axiological rationality. Three modeling modes have been selected, and their strengths and weaknesses are presented and discussed from this perspective. Some economists assume that an agent’s rational calculus takes into account an additional ethical constraint (‘constraints-based approach’). For others, morality intervenes directly in the agent’s preference system (‘preference-based approach’). In this line of research yet two approaches must be distinguished: ‘social preferences models’ assume that people have other-regarding preferences while ‘multi-preferences models’ contrast moral preferences to more material ones with the aim to construct a utility function that would reflect a compromise. A final approach can be seen as an attempt to reconcile conceptions of morality as both constraint and preference (‘hybrid’ approach) by proposing ‘hierarchical-preferences’ models, in which moral values are no longer included in the utility function but are used to filter out immoral preferences. We argue that, although each of these approaches has certain advantages in its own right, multi-preference models seem to be the most appropriate way for modeling axiological rationality.