Self-Interest, Love, and Economic Justice: A Dialogue Between Classical Economic Liberalism and Catholic Social Teaching

This essay seeks to start a dialogue between two traditions that historically have interpreted the economy in opposing ways: the individualism of classic economic liberalism (CEL), represented by Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, and the communitarianism of Catholic social teaching (CST), interpreted primarily through the teachings of popes and secondarily the U.S. Catholic bishops. The present authors, an economist and a moral theologian who identify with one or the other of the two traditions, strive to clarify objectively their similarities and differences with the opposing perspective. Section one focuses on each position's perspective of love of self and love of others. We find both CEL and CST saying that self-love, rightly understood, constitutes a moral good and that the love of others serves as an important principle in the political economy. We find less agreement in section two regarding justice and rights, but even here, we discover a few surprises. Both traditions uphold justice (giving to each party what is due) as essential to the political economy, and recognize some similarity in that type of justice called commutative. We note, however, substantial differences regarding a second type of justice that we call "public justice." First, they differ over the extent to which government should be involved. Here the meaning of rights, especially that of individual freedom, arises. Secondly, the traditions diverge over whether benevolence as a motivator ought to serve as a partner for public justice. Thirdly, CEL in general opposes CST's emphasis on social justice that calls upon institutions to be proactive in helping citizens and groups to become active participants in the economy. We conclude our essay by summarizing our discoveries and by suggesting areas for further dialogue.     

Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Ethic, and Adam Smith

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) Adam Smith draws on the Stoic idea of a Providence that uses everything for the good of the whole. The process is often painful, so the Stoic ethic insisted on conscious cooperation. Stoic ideas contributed to the rise of science and enjoyed wide popularity in Smith’s England. Smith was more influenced by the Stoicism of his professors than by the Epicureanism of Hume. In TMS, Marcus Aurelius’s “helmsman” becomes the “impartial spectator,” who judges actions in terms of the way they are seen by others. This is the key to justice, without which society collapses. Business school students should be taught that Smith’s “invisible hand” is best understood as a universal rationality that uses just actions for the benefit of the whole.     

Adam Smith's concept of the social system

This essay will postulate that Adam Smith's view of society was formulated out of historical influences far broader than generally conceded by many commentators in economic thought. Smith's basic behavioral concepts of sympathy and self-interest are significant contributions to economic thought as are his philosophy of human nature being based on liberty and freedom and not simply the creation of wealth. The vectors of influence that converged on Adam Smith were of varied and even contradictory natures. Yet the result of this collision of philosophical forces was clearly an event of significance in the history of philosophical and economic thought.Edward W. Coker is presently an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at USM-Gulf Coast, teaching primarily in the area of economics and finance. Dr. Coker has appeared on the programs of the American Economic Association, the Southern Economic Association and the Financial Management Association, both as presenter and discussant of papers. His interest in business ethics is reflected in his doctoral dissertation on the writings of Adam Smith. He is also a member of the Association for Social Economics and has participated on several panels sponsored by that organization.     

亚当·斯密的市场道德秩序论

市场道德秩序论是亚当·斯密经济伦理思想的灵魂,它适合于市场经济,是道德观念、市场法则和一般准则的自发融合,并以国民素养培育为保证。德福一致、诚信守法、容忍失败是市场道德秩序论的基本原则。市场的道德秩序不仅是市场经济健康高效运行的基础,还是原发创新性的动力源泉。     

Expanding Workers’ ‘Moral Space’: A Liberal Critique of Corporate Capitalism

This paper assesses employees’ moral agency within corporate capitalism from a politically liberal standpoint. While political liberalism has spelt out its key institutional implications at state level, it has neglected moral agency at work, assuming that a rights-based state that secures freedom of contract, free choice of occupation and a free labour market within a fair context would protect it sufficiently. Yet two features of corporate capitalism constrain employees’ moral agency: the relation of authority that forms part of the work contract and organisations’ fragmented decision-making processes. Both seem at odds with the liberal ideal of allowing people to live by their own conception of the good. Consequently, this paper examines whether political liberalism should recommend greater safeguards for protecting workers’ moral agency. It proposes a criterion for assessing corporate capitalism: the ‘moral space’ defined as the socially shaped opportunities for action that can be enacted or endorsed from a comprehensive perspective. It argues that liberals should favour arrangements that widen workers’ moral space and suggests institutional designs that may achieve this while remaining within liberal boundaries.     

Custom and Moral Sentiment: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Postgraduate Student Perceptions of Leadership Ethicality

The recent crisis in a prominent German car manufacturer generated by unethical leadership practices has brought into sharp focus, once again, the need for radical and fundamental ethical transformation among members of capitalism’s leadership elite. The divide between ethics and business needs to be closed and to do this effectively in a globalized world, cross-cultural aspects of moral sentiment need to be better understood. The current paper contributes to the extant literature in this regard by describing and analyzing cross-cultural aspects of German and South African student’s ‘sympathy’ towards business ethical phenomena, using Adam Smith’s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiment’ as a theoretical framework and qualitative methods. The paper constructs a heuristic device based on Adam Smith’s theoretical framework and then proceeds to empirically analyze the theory by investigating German and South African student moral sentiments towards specific ethical leadership behaviors. The study indicates that while there is general cross-cultural homogeneity in moral approbation among students for fundamental aspects of ethical leadership behavior, nuanced custom-based differences emerge from the qualitative analysis. Following Adam Smith, fine grained differences in moral sentiment arising from ‘custom’ are evident. Thus, although ethicality of specific leadership behavior is found to be viewed similarly by both groups of students, significant nuanced differences arise in German students who emphasize intellectual autonomy over the conservatism favored by their South African counterparts. Practical aspects of these findings are briefly discussed.     

论我国伦理经济观重塑与社会主义和谐社会的构建

在中国长期以儒家为中心的文化氛围中,伦理经济思想是社会经济肌体运行的主要指导。在近代西方经济思想中,以亚当·斯密为代表的古典经济学家所倡导的＂经济人＂理论,奠基了西方经济伦理的道德基础。而现代经济学中的＂理性经济人＂理论逐渐抛弃了古典学派＂经济人＂理论所蕴涵的伦理传统,以单纯追求自我利益最大化为惟一的理性,从而导致＂经济人＂伦理道德的缺失。建立在单一经济观基础上的现代西方经济学理论虽促进了现代经济的繁荣与发展,也带来一系列不良后果。建设社会主义和谐社会,需要继承中西方传统文化的精髓,对＂经济人＂理性重新改造,重塑伦理经济观。     

借贷中的私人关系嵌入问题研究

关系借贷是我国金融领域的普遍现象 ,本文采用社会嵌入性的分析框架 ,认为经济交易是嵌入于当事人的具体的社会关系之中的 ,经济交易域嵌入社会交换域或政治域放松了贷方交易域的激励约束 ,当贷方是银行代理经营者时 ,经营者与关系人形成二次嵌入关系 ,并可能与关系人合谋 ,从中谋取私利 ,关系有助于解决意会信息问题 ,并对借方的道德风险起一定的约束作用 ,但不能完全解决逆向选择和道德风险。     

政治风险与中国企业对外直接投资——基于东道国与母国两个维度的实证分析

利用中国大陆企业对外直接投资(OFDI)统计数据和两类政治风险指数进行实证研究,结果发现:来自东道国的政治风险对OFDI有着显著的负向影响;本土的政治风险对于OFDI也有实质影响;经济增长、经济开放程度以及政府政策等因素对OFDI也有显著作用。     

Value, Business and Globalisation – Sketching a Critical Conceptual Framework

Value is a basic concept in economics, ethics and sociology. Locke made labour the source of value, whereas Smith referred to an ideal exchange and Kant specified that commodities only have a market price, no intrinsic value. One can distinguish two modern concepts of value, an economic one trying to explain value in terms of utility, interest or preferences, and an ideal one considering values as ends in themselves. On this basis, Durkheim constructed his theory of value, which was developed by his followers Mauss and Bouglé and further by Bataille. Their line of thought makes it possible to develop a conceptual framework, which can be used to criticise neo-liberalism, big business and the effects of globalisation, while at the same time defending the moral value of business and giving an interpretation of the anti-globalisation protests.     

“Moral Distance” in Organizations: An Inquiry into Ethical Violence in the Works of Kafka

In this paper, we demonstrate that the works of Franz Kafka provide an exemplary resource for the investigation of “moral distance” in organizational ethics. We accomplish this in two ways, first by drawing on Kafka’s work to navigate the complexities of the debate over the ethics of bureaucracy, using his work to expand and enrich the concept of “moral distance.” Second, Kafka’s work is used to investigate the existence of “ethical violence” within organizations which entails acts of condemnation and cruelty purportedly in the name of ethics. Kafka’s work provides insight into the processes of moral distancing across a range of organizational contexts including highly formal as well as more informal settings. The paper enriches the concept “moral distance” by identifying the existence of facilitators of moral distance beyond the mechanisms of formal rationality that have been the focus of existing studies. We argue that Kafka’s intense portrayal of “ethical violence” points to an aporia at the very heart of organizational ethics.     

Leadership After Virtue: MacIntyre’s Critique of Management Reconsidered

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership.     

Managerial Authority as Political Authority: A Retrospective Examination of Christopher McMahon’s Authority and Democracy

An introduction to the March, 2005 symposium “The Political Theory of Organizations: A Retrospective Examination of Christopher McMahon’s Authority and Democracy” held in San Francisco as part of the Society for Business Ethics Group Meeting at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association. Jeffery Smith is an Assistant Professor and founding Director of the Banta Center for Business, Ethics and Society at the University of Redlands. His current research focuses on communicative ethics and the moral foundations of collaborative decision-making within economic organizations. He is also interested in the role of principles in moral decision-making and the extent to which principled decisions can be made in organizational contexts. Professor Smith’s writings have appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics: A European Review, Southern Journal of Philosophy and in other journals. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2000.     

Exploring and Exposing Values in Management Education: Problematizing Final Vocabularies in Order to Enhance Moral Imagination

In business schools, there is a persistent myth according to which management education is, and should be, ‘value-free’. This article reflects on the experiences of two business schools from Finland and Australia in which the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) have been pragmatically used as a platform for breaking with this institutionalized guise of positivist value neutrality. This use of PRME makes it possible to create learning environments in which values and value tensions inherent in management education can be explored and exposed. Inspired by Rorty’s understanding of ethics—notably his discussion of ‘final vocabularies’ and ‘moral imagination’—and Flyvbjerg’s reading of phronēsis, the article discusses an approach to learning that helps both teachers and students in exploring and exposing values in management education by problematizing dominant business school vocabularies, thereby leading to moral development, in the Rortian sense. The article presents a number of final vocabularies that business students come to class with, some learning methods used to challenge these vocabularies through discussion of alternative vocabularies, and the new directions for moral imagination that may result.     

中国城乡购买力:由失衡走向平衡

近些年中国经济增长面临越来越严峻的需求约束,虽然政府采取一系列启动需求的政策措施,但收效甚微,政策实施效果与预期存在较大差距,其主因在于中国典型的二元经济结构特征决定了城乡居民购买力的差别和特殊性。基于这一视角,提出一个衡量中国城乡购买力平衡与否的标尺,并基于1991—2009年省级面板数据实证分析城乡购买力的现状,结果显示,现阶段中国城乡购买力仍处于失衡状态,同时仍有诸如城乡收入差距、城乡消费方式差异、城乡商贸流通体系等因素制约着城乡购买力从失衡走向均衡。     

品牌德商:品牌道德诉求的效用

品牌德商的提出把道德价值作为品牌形象的考量尺度,其要旨是企业品牌经营活动应基于正当性、合理性和规范性,并以独特的道德价值主张,通过品牌管理,把品牌的经济效益与社会效益有机结合起来,从而以内生的德性力量不断推进品牌持续发展壮大。基于迄今中国众多品牌的发展现状及社会营销环境,把品牌道德规范及合德行为作为品牌德商提出是可行的也是必要的,它把品牌道德诉求及行为作为一种内在于品牌的道德力量,使企业品牌经营的合德性从监督的被动变为自律的主动,从仅仅满足物质功利欲求擢升至社会精神价值总量的创造。     

Will the Real A. Smith Please Stand Up!

In both the public and the business world, in academe as well as in practice, the ideas of Adam Smith are regarded as the bedrock of modern economics. When present economic conditions and management practices are criticised, Adam Smith is referred to by defenders and detractors of the current status quo alike. Smith, it is believed, defined the essential terms of reference of these debates, such as the rational pursuit of self-interest on part of the individual and the resultant optimal allocation of goods in free markets thanks to the workings of an “invisible hand.” In this article, we question whether this standard view of Smith, the economist, is tenable. We provide an extensive review of the extant secondary literature from economists, business ethicists, and philosophers, comparing their assessments to crucial elements of Smith’s theoretical system. As a result, we show that Smith, far from being an advocate of a value-free or even value-averse conception of economic transactions, stood for a virtue-based and values-oriented model of business. Accordingly, we argue current management education and the pedagogy of business ethics ought to be changed, and certain strategic conclusions drawn for business practice.     

国外商业地产投资风险研究综述

近年来国外学术界对于商业地产相关理论与实证研究越发广泛。本文以商业地产的内涵及相关理论为基础,梳理了近三十年国外商业地产风险问题的文献研究成果,讨论了商业地产研究范围及主要研究内容,认为未来研究可在考虑我国独特的经济和金融制度背景下,通过行业数据挖掘探讨特殊类型的商业地产系统风险与非系统风险动态影响与耦合关系,以为商业地产风险性问题的理论研究和实践活动提供借鉴和参考。