Contains 10 lessons that reintroduce an ethical dimension to economics. Students will learn about the important role ethics and character play in a market economy and how, in turn, markets influence ethical behavior.
Integrative Economic Ethics is a highly original work that progresses through a series of rational and philosophical arguments to address foundational issues concerning the relationship between ethics and the market economy. Rather than accepting market competition as a driver of ethical behaviour, the author shows that modern economies need to develop ethical principles that guide market competition, thus moving business ethics into the realms of political theory and civic rationality. This book was in its fourth edition in the original German in 2008, this English translation of Peter Ulrich's development of a fresh integrative approach to economic ethics will be of interest to all scholars and advanced students of business ethics, economics, and social and political philosophy.
This book examines the theoretical foundations of order ethics and discusses business ethics problems from an order ethics perspective. Order ethics focuses on the social order and the institutional environment in which individuals interact. It is a well-established paradigm in European business ethics. The book contains articles written by leading experts in the field and provides both a concise introduction to order ethics and short summary articles homing in on specific aspects of the order-ethical paradigm. It presents contributions describing fundamental concepts, historical roots, and the economic, social, and philosophical background of the theory. The second part of the handbook focuses on the theory's application in business, society, and politics, casting new light on an array of topics that loom large in contemporary ethical discourse.
Piderit explores the failures of mainstream economics and proposes an alternative grounded in natural law. His assessment is grounded in the Christian higher law tradition which assumes that objective standards known to human reason should govern society and individuals. This book demonstrates both the reasonableness of a distinguished ethical tradition and its capacity to address a wide range of ethical issues, economic as well as personal and social. Piderit emphasizes that natural law theory underlies the U.S. Constitution and informs Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish worship today.
This book addresses current practices related to sustainable development, its challenges and the future. People belonging to different genders regardless of their age, social class and education should be equal as citizens and individuals, and identical in their rights and responsibilities. The business sector, authorities, societies and religious circles have the potential to play a fundamental role in curbing social ills and the degradation of the environment in this modern world. The authors of this book argue that without good governance, the status of a human being is unlikely to improve. They make the case that to achieve sustainability, government, society and the economy must ensure a platform for people to participate in decision-making and benefit from the rights they are accorded. By covering a range of perspectives across economic, social and moral life, the book will shed light on the problems and possible solutions to sustainable development and the triple bottom line, of people, planet and profit, under the umbrella of morals and divine law. This will be a useful guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students across multiple disciplines, such as economics, religious studies, business studies, political science, anthropology and sociology.
With insight, clarity, warmth, and enthusiasm Hazel Henderson announces the mature presence of the green economy. Mainstream media and big business interests have sidelined its emergence and evolution to preserve the status quo. Throughout Ethical Markets Henderson weaves statistics and analysis with profiles of entrepreneurs, environmentalists, scientists, and professionals. Based on interviews conducted on her longstanding public television series, these profiles celebrate those who have led the highly successful growth of green businesses around the world. Ethical Markets is the ultimate sourcebook on today's thriving green economy.
Preface -- Toward commercial order -- Foundations -- Neither angel nor beast -- The system of natural liberty -- The liberty of law -- Challenges -- The temptation of politics -- The dilemma of democracy -- Culture and the possibility of "non-spontaneous" commercial society.
Free-market economics has attempted to combine efficiency and freedom by emphasizing the need for neutral rules and meta-rules. These efforts have only been partly successful, for they have failed to address the deeper, normative arguments justifying – and limiting – coercion. This failure has thus left most advocates of free-market vulnerable to formulae which either emphasize expediency or which rely upon optimal social engineering to foster different notions of the common will and of the common good. This book offers the reader a new perspective on free-market economics, one in which the defense of markets is no longer based upon the utilitarian claim that free markets are more efficient; rather, the defense of markets rests upon the moral argument that top-down coercive policy-making is necessarily in tension with the rights-based notion of justice typical of the Western tradition. In arguing for a consistent moral basis for the free-market view, we depart from both the Austrian and neoclassical traditions by acknowledging that rationality is not a satisfactory starting point. This rejection of rationality as the complete motivator for human economic behaviour throws constitutional economics and the law-and-economics tradition into new relief, revealing these approaches as governed by considerations derived by various notions of social efficiency, rather than by principles consistent with individual freedom, including freedom to choose. This book shows that the solution is in fact a better understanding of the lessons taught by the Scottish Enlightenment: the role of the political context is to ensure that the individual can pursue his own ends, free from coercion. This also implies individual responsibility, respect for somebody else’s preferences and for his entrepreneurial instincts. Social virtue is not absent from this understanding of politics, but rather than being defined through the priorities of policy-makers, it emerges as the outcome of interaction among self-determining individuals. The strongest and most consistent case for free-market economics, therefore, rests on moral philosophy, not on some version of static-efficiency theorizing. This book should be of interest to students and researchers focussing on economic theory, political economics and the philosophy of economic thought, but is also written in a non-technical style making it accessible to an audience of non-economists.
A more ethical economic system is now possible, one that rectifies the crisis spots of our current downturn while balancing the injustices of extreme poverty and wealth. Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen, a scholar and an entrepreneur, outline the shape such an economy might take, identifying its origins in innovations already existent in our production, valuation, and distribution systems. Much like nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, philosophers, bankers, artisans, and social organizers who planned a course for modern capitalism that was more economically efficient and ethically desirable, we now have a chance to construct new instruments, institutions, and infrastructure to reverse the trajectory of a quickly deteriorating economic environment. Considering a multitude of emerging phenomena, Arvidsson and Peitersen show wealth creation can be the result of a new kind of social production, and the motivation of continuous capital accumulation can exist in tandem with a new desire to maximize our social impact. Arvidsson and Peitersen argue that financial markets could become a central arena in which diverse ethical concerns are integrated into tangible economic valuations. They suggest that such a common standard has already emerged and that this process is linked to the spread of social media, making it possible to capture the sentiment of value to most people. They ultimately recommend how to build upon these developments to initiate a radical democratization of economic systems and the value decisions they generate.