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.     

商品经济与西周经济伦理初探

西周和殷商一样是一个崇尚求利的时代,它非常重视手工业及商业发展;专业商人的形成和富贾的出现是西周商品经济发展的显着特点;"求利正当性"式的经济伦理是西周伦理道德的基础,西周的经济伦理注重工商业者的职业伦理,实质即所谓"商人精神",这在西周经济思想史上有其独特意义。在当前,尤其是要汲取传统的优秀的经济伦理思想,以此来解决社会上存在的一些经济伦理问题。     

略论经济伦理道德建设在规范市场秩序中的作用

社会主义市场经济一方面需要有健全的经济调节手段、行政调节手段和法律调节手段,另一方面,还需要有健全的经济道德原则和规范,以及在此基础上形成的强大的社会舆论和牢固的内心信念。尤其是在我国已经加入了WTO的新的形势下,加强经济伦理道德建设,对于建立新的市场秩序,保证社会主义经济的有序运行,促进国民经济持续、快速、健康发展,有着不可替代的重要作用。     

The Work Ethic Values of Protestant British, Catholic Irish and Muslim Turkish Managers

This paper examines the work ethic characteristics of particular practising Protestant, Catholic and Muslim managers in Britain, Ireland and Turkey. Max Weber, argued that Protestant societies had a particular work ethic which was quite distinct from non-Protestant societies. The Protestant work ethics (PWE) thesis of Weber was reviewed. Previous empirical and analytical research results showed that the number of research results which support Weberian ideas were more than those which did not support. Methodological issues were also discussed. Results revealed that there was a considerable difference between Muslim and other groups in terms of PWE characteristics. The Muslim group showed the highest PWE level, while the Protestant group was placed second and the Catholic group third. The Protestant group showed a slightly higher of PWE level than the Catholic group. The possible reasons for the higher level of the PWE values of Muslim managers are discussed in the light of historical, political, social and economic developments in Turkey.     

Responding Destructively in Leadership Situations: The Role of Personal Values and Problem Construction

This study explored the influence of personal values on destructive leader behavior. Student participants completed a managerial assessment center that presented them with ambiguous leadership decisions and problems. Destructive behavior was defined as harming organizational members or striving for short-term gains over long-term organizational goals. Results revealed that individuals with self-enhancement values were more destructive than individuals with self-transcendence values were, with the core values of power (self-enhancement) and universalism (self-transcendence) being most influential. Results also showed that individuals defined and structured leadership problems in a manner that reflected their value systems, which in turn affected the problem solutions they generated.     

Economics and the Environment: A "Land Ethic" Critique of Economic Policy

This paper is a twenty-five year retrospective on the development of environmental consciousness in the US The Clean Air Act is taken as proxy for companion measures in water and other areas of the environment, and the emphasis on "efficiency" and "market compatibility" is noted with a mixture of caution and hope. The work of an eminent pragmatic ethicist, Ado Leopard, is re-visited. From the pages of A Sand County Almanac, his notion that right and wrong, good and bad, be assessed in terms of the tendency to produce or preserve "the integrity, beauty, and stability of the biotic community" is explicitly adopted. Leopold's ethical consciousness raises a question: what reasons do we have to believe that an efficient, booming economy can be made compatible with a finite natural system? Are there boundaries that the economy must respect, or can we "out run" those limits with our technology and expertise?     

Reasons To Be Ethical: Self-Interest and Ethical Business

This paper examines the self-interested reasons that businesses can have for ethical behaviour. It distinguishes between economic and non-economic reasons and, among the latter, notes those connected with the self-esteem of managers. It offers a detailed typology of prudential reasons for ethical behaviour, laying particular stress on those to do with avoiding punishment by society for wrongdoing and, more particularly still, stresses the role of campaigning pressure groups within that particular category of reasons. It goes on to suggest that because of their occupation of the moral high ground, campaigning groups are well placed to damage the self-esteem of managers and that this is why those groups seem able to exert an influence that goes beyond their somewhat limited capacity to inflict economic damage upon businesses. The paper concludes with the suggestion that we may be witnessing a virtuous spiral whereby rising public expectations of morality in business lead to ever increasing moral commitments by business that then cause those expectations to rise still further.     

Work Values Ethic, GNP Per Capita and Country of Birth Relationships

Workplaces around the world have experienced extraordinary changes to the composition of their workforces and the nature of work. Few studies have explored workers from multiple countries of birth, with multiple religious orientations, working together within a single country of residence. Building on and extending the Work Values Ethic (WVE) literature, we examine 1,382 responses from employees working in three manufacturing companies. Differences were found in the mean WVE scores of groups of respondents from 42 countries of birth. Their WVE scores were strongly associated with their birth countries’ per capita Gross National Product (GNP), and the means of these scores did not change with variations in the respondents’ length of residence in a different country. These results have implications for developing cross-cultural management practices and for improving relationships with employees, with opportunities for increased commitment and, potentially, productivity.     

Cultural Values,Economic Growth and Development

This empirical study investigates the effects of nine ethical climate types (self-interest, company profit, efficiency, friendship, team interest, social responsibility, personal morality, company rules and procedures, and lastly laws and professional codes) on employee work satisfaction. The ethical climate typology developed by Victor and Cullen (in W. C. Frederick (ed.) Research in Corporate Social Performance and Policy, 1987; Administrative Science Quarterly 33, 101–125, 1988) is tested on a sample of staff and managers from 62 different telecommunication firms in Turkey. The results obtained from the 1174 usable questionnaires confirm the existence of nine different ethical climate types observed in western cultures in the present sample context, which is a developing Muslim country. Regarding the effects of ethical climatic factors on employee work satisfaction, self-interest climate type appears to negatively influence work satisfaction, whereas team interest, social responsibility and law and professional codes climate types are found to have positive impacts. Managerial and further research implications of the findings are discussed.     

Outing the Silent Partner: Espousing the Economic Values that Operate in Not-For-Profit Organizations

The tension between organizational values and the operation of aged care as a business is often characterized as the “mission versus margin” dilemma. It is common across the industry in both not-for-profit and for-profit organizations. However, in for-profit aged care facilities, there is no question about the intention to make a profit or the purpose of the profits. This is not so clear in not-for-profit aged care organizations. This article explores the tension through the examination of a detailed case study of one of the larger not-for-profit social service organizations—All Saints Christian Care. It analyses the culture and managerial decisions though the lens of the political philosophy value pluralism. Finally, based on the value-plural theory, recommendations are made that would create greater operational transparency in not-for-profit aged care service.     

我国外向型经济发展战略面临的问题及建议

我国外向型经济的不断发展一定程度上造成我国外贸依存度持续升高。近来,外贸依存度偏高的企业有可能带来的风险与挑战已引起各界关注。本文从我国外向型战略的形成过程入手,在积极评价该战略成功经验的基础上,着重分析了在新形势下该战略所面临的问题,提出了适时调整我国外向型经济发展战略,加快外贸增长方式的转变,并逐步向内需主导型发展战略模式过渡的建议。     

How Economic Incentives May Destroy Social,Ecological and Existential Values: The Case of Executive Compensation

Executive compensation has long been a prominent topic in the management literature. A main question that is also given substantial attention in the business ethics literature—even more so in the wake of the recent financial crisis—is whether increasing levels of executive compensation can be justified from an ethical point of view. Also, the relationship of executive compensation to instances of unethical behavior or outcomes has received considerable attention. The purpose of this paper is to explore the social, ecological, and existential costs of economic incentives, by discussing how relying on increasing levels of executive compensation may have an adverse effect on managerial performance in a broad sense. Specifically, we argue that one-dimensional economic incentives may destroy existential, social, and systemic values that influence the manager’s commitment to ensure responsible business conduct, and have negative spillover effects that may reduce the manager’s performance. There are well-documented findings that demonstrate that reliance on sources of extrinsic motivation (such as economic incentives) may displace intrinsic motivation. Our perspective is a holistic one, in the sense that we will explore the influence of sources of extrinsic motivation on the manager’s intrinsic commitment to different types of values. We will in particular investigate how it may influence the manager’s ethical reflection and behavior or lack thereof.     

中国出口鼓励贸易政策的经济效率问题

本文首次创立了评估出口鼓励贸易政策经济效率的指标体系,并通过这些指标体系来分析中国出口鼓励贸易政策的经济效率.作者借鉴J.丁伯根提出的定量经济政策工具的效率系数理论,并将该理论延伸到出口鼓励贸易政策中,首次提出了出口鼓励贸易政策工具的效率系数,并对出口退税、出口补贴和出口信贷3项主要的出口鼓励贸易政策的效率系数进行了实证检验,最后提出当前出口鼓励贸易政策向高效率方向调整的政策建议.     

Europe's Economic Malaise: a Problem of Competitiveness?

Unemployment in the EU is double that in the USA and over three times the level in Japan. This article discusses whether it makes sense to think of this as a problem of lack of European competitiveness. It outlines the policies that European countries should pursue, both collectively and individually, to combat Europe's economic malaise.     

Work Ethic and Ethical Work: Distortions in the American Dream

Economic progress in the United States has been attributed to the successful combination of two social structures – capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system. At the heart of this interaction is a particular work ethic in which hard work is considered the path to both immediate and future rewards. This article examines the evolution of work ethic in the United States, as well as the returns experienced through various adaptations in the country’s history. From this grounding, the information is structured into a proposal that key messages contained in the current, accepted work ethic are subject to distortions that may contribute to unethical decision making. These distortions result from two potentials: (1) efforts to reconcile the work ethic with contradictory messages and (2) exaggerations of the work ethic that become dysfunctional. The intent is to provide a framework that may explain to organizational leaders how people with the same basic work ethic can behave differently in terms of ethical work. Along with this understanding comes the potential to offset possible distortions and to encourage more ethical behavior.     

The Business Ethic in Public Sector Catering

Consecutive Conservative governments since 1979 have emphasised the need for greater cost-efficiency in the provision of public services. This article places recent developments in public sector catering in this wider context. It considers the manner in which government policy towards public sector catering has affected organisational and technical change in this area, and how this has led to changes in the roles, styles, strategies and control of catering managers. The article also outlines the effects of change on staff. In conclusion the article argues that management in the public sector are increasingly likely to act according to a business ethic’, rather than a ‘public service ethic’.     

Out of the Shadows: Using Value Pluralism to Make Explicit Economic Values in Not-for-Profit Business Strategies

Ethics is central to leadership because of the impact leaders have on establishing organizational values and engaging followers to accomplish mutual goals. The ethical concerns of leaders may influence ethical decision-making of their followers. This paper attempts to investigate the relationship between leaders and followers on moral judgment, and make a comparison between China and Taiwan on the leader–follower moral judgment relationship. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey on purchasing professionals in China and Taiwan. The development of moral judgment was measured using the defining issues test. Research findings indicate that followers exhibit higher level of moral judgment while their leaders have higher level of moral judgment. A positive moral judgment relationship exists between leaders and followers. The comparative study between China and Taiwan reveals that Chinese purchasing professionals are more easily influenced by their workplace leaders than their Taiwanese counterparts. Power distance would strengthen the leader–follower moral judgment relationship. The present research makes contributions toward the ethics literature by providing empirical insight into the relationship between leader moral judgment and follower moral judgment. This paper also suggests implications and opportunities for future research.     

西方电子商务活动中的伦理问题

伴随着西方电子商务的飞速发展,产生了诸多伦理问题,如隐私权伦理、安全伦理、利益冲突伦理、恐龙行为等,这些都是电子商务环境所特有的。本文认为,当这些问题出现时,互联网会很快反映出来。由于其暴露于公众面前和市场环境之中,一些伦理问题可以迅速得到解决;同时由于互联网技术不断带来新的产品和服务,并将其推向使用了新策略的市场中去,新的伦理问题又会不断涌现。揭示这些伦理问题,对形成符合道德标准的自律的电子商务环境具有十分重要的意义。     

对老年期价值变化的人口经济学研究

通过分年龄劳动参与率、工资率等指标,借助于调查资料建立起了我国分年龄人口经济贡献模拟量表,从人口经济学角度研究人的生命周期,观察不同年龄段的经济价值,揭示老年人的价值特征;提出老年期的经济价值是终生积累的结果,必须将一生联系起来研究;老年人消费的是一生中自己创造的价值;推迟退休年龄和提高劳动生产率是人口老龄化提出的必然要求;代际之间在经济关系上的接替是社会发展的客观规律等.