Challenging the root of choice theory??eh?
Alan Isaac wrote: ?A claim that humans make economic choices because they have free will is (?.) a pointless claim for economists: economic science acquires nothing from the claim (except the useless possibility of truly inexplicable actions).?
 
This really touches the crux of the epistemology of choice theory.  I would make three points, each fatal to prevailing ideas of choice theory.
1.    The first point supports Alan Isaac in the following manner: The idea of rational choice really does not add anything to economics. Consider biologists trying to explain the behavior of animals with regard to production and consumption in the state of nature. Say there is a mouse foraging for food, and it sees n different insects or food elements to forage. It must conserve energy so that it does not spend more energy to catch the insect than it gains from eating the meal. It must minimize the expenditure of energy for any given procurement of food. It is the same thing as to say it must maximize the (revenue/ income/ energy) gain from the expenditure of a given quantum of (labor) energy. The optimization model of the economist has nothing to add to the biologist?s explanation of conservation of energy transmuted as optimization. Call it free will or not, and it does not matter. It is biology.
2.    Now, consider a specifically human act of abrogating the law of nature, and instituting a human (institutional) law in its place.  Compare a man and a fox in the state of nature: both are hunting animals who will catch and immediately eat a hen. But suppose the man does something no fox will ever do: instead of eating the hen, he does the opposite: he feeds it and protects it from other predators. This he does in order to make a gain nature never intended: to allow the hen to lay eggs and breed chicks before the hen is finally killed and eaten. This unnatural act is entrepreneurial, and the choice is specifically human choice.  It is certainly not rational choice. 
3.    The entrepreneurial choice cannot be an individual choice: it must be social choice. Consider the early days of pastoralism. Natural foragers had always hunted down cows and pigs and other animals and never thought of breeding them or feeding them or protecting them from other predators. In nature, there is just no reason to invest labor in the breeding and keeping of prey animals. If one individual begins to raise cattle, others may not recognize his claim of exclusive ownership over it, because in nature, nobody can establish a claim of private ownership over anything: it is all out war out there.  That is, it makes no sense for an individual to raise cattle until other humans are willing to grant the right of the individual to claim private ownership over the cattle raised by his labor investment. It is a social choice because the entrepreneurial act of raising cattle is conditional on the acceptance of the rest of society that the individual has a right to claim exclusive private ownership over his cattle.
Let us see why the three points above are fatal to neoclassical economics. The first point is that rational choice has nothing uniquely human: it is a pattern of natural choice under the compulsion of the natural law of subsistence. This law mandates that an animal must produce what it wishes to consume, and it cannot consume what it has not produced. Nature actually mandates predation or plunder: the strong shall kill and eat the weak and never pay. To get out of the ecology, man must abrogate the law of nature so that he will produce what he does not wish to consume (but wishes to sell) and he will consume what he has not produced (but what he has bought). Man must forbid plunder of the weak by the strong and compel the would-be plunderer to pay. Unless you recognize payment, you are an ecologist. To be an economist, you must recognize payment. Choice theory that does not explicitly impose the compulsion of payment is good for biology (ecology), not for economics.
Secondly, human choice to contravene natural law, impose the payment obligation on the would-be plunderer, and the decision to knowingly produce for others must be understood in the ?economic? context of exchange. That is, exchange creates the economy while production and consumption (not intended for exchange) remain matters of ecology. Rational choice applies to ecology, not economy. In the economy, the relevant choice is entrepreneurial. Its goal is to create value that did not exist: it is for pure gains not available without exchange. Profit is identically zero in ecological equilibrium: the producer is compelled to consume what he has produced at his marginal cost, with no chance of finding a buyer who is willing to pay a price above marginal cost. Economic equilibrium must necessarily be one with profit. No seller would bother to sell if not for profit. There is risk that the seller may end up with loss, but that does not mean equilibrium profit must be zero. In short, economic choice, as distinguished from ecological choice, must be understood with reference to pure profit. 
To be economic choice, one must show explicitly that there is an entrepreneur whose pursuit of pure profit leads to his economic actions: all of his economic actions, save none. Thus if one is puzzled why 96% of the world?s people (circa 1992) who eat enough food do not produce food while 91% of the world?s hungry people are food producers themselves, one does not grasp the idea of economic choice and its consequence: the economic choice for you is to produce what you will not consume and to consume what you will not produce.  If you consume what you produce, you are in the ecology: you just kill and eat others, unless you are a grass eating beast waiting to be eaten by big cats.
Lastly, an isolated individual cannot be a buyer or seller and hence must make ecological choice of producing what he consumes.  To make an economic choice, the individual must be dependent on his customers and suppliers, and this dependency must be expressed by the means of payments he receives and pays. His choices are not independent of the choices of his customers and suppliers. In short, there is no economic choice that can be strictly individualistic: it must necessarily be a social choice. 
 
Mohammad Gani