Ethics and the Future of Capitalism

Wojciech W. Gasparski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765801203
• eBook ISBN: 9781351324663
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

With the collapse of communism and the accelerated trend of globalization, a new stage of capitalism has arrived. Protest actions that occurred in Seattle and Washington as well as in Prague and Genoa, clearly show that the legitimacy of capitalism is being questioned in many respects. Surveys in Eastern and Central Europe show that a considerable part of the population is not able to accept capitalism as an economic system. This volume assesses the ethical basis of capitalism in an effort to assess its future in the twenty-first century.Contributors range from one of the world's most successful capitalists and philanthropists to the founder of INSEAD, Europe's leading business school, to noted economists, philosophers, cultural historians, and business ethicists.

Responsibility and Profit Making

László Zsolnai

Business Ethics Center

Budapest University of Economic Sciences

Hungary

If you want to make a profit please care about
the world because we and other beings want
to live in the same world.
(Public advertisement in London)

In a world that is ruled by giant multinational corporations producing large-scale environmental destruction and human deprivation, the conventional justification of profit making is not valid any more.

Social critique David Korten writes

We are experiencing accelerating social and environmental disintegration in nearly every country of the world – as revealed by a rise of poverty, unemployment, inequality, violent crime, failing families, and environmental degradation [...] [Economic globalization] shifting power away from governments responsible for the public good and toward a handful of corporations and financial institutions driven by a single imperative – the quest for short-term financial gain. This has concentrated massive economic and political power in the hands of an elite few whose absolute share of the products of a declining pool of natural wealth continues to increase at a substantial rate. (Korten, D. 1996, p. 11. and p. 12.)

One of the most successful capitalists of our age, George Soros emphasizes that the financial success of an action cannot guarantee that the action was right. He writes:

in the social sphere what is effective is not necessarily identical with what is right, because of the reflexive connection between thinking and reality. [...] the cult of success can become a source of instability in an open society, because it can undermine our sense of right and wrong. That is what is happening in our society today. Our sense of right and wrong is endangered by our preoccupation with success measured by money. Anything goes, as long as you can get away with it. (Soros, G. 1997, p. 12.)

In the context of the contemporary global economy a new form of ethical and social justification of profit making is badly needed. Responsibility is central in providing criteria for acceptable business practices.

1. The Idea of Responsibility

German-American philosopher, Hans Jonas injected the idea of responsibility into the modern moral discourse. In his opus magnum Das Prinzip Verantwortung Jonas argues that the nature of human action has changed so dramatically in our times that this changed nature of human action calls for a radical change in ethics as well.

He emphasizes that in previous ethics:

[...] all dealing with the non-human world, that is, the whole realm of techne [...] was ethically neutral. (...) Ethical significance belonged to the direct dealing of man with man, including man dealing with himself: all traditional ethics is anthropocentric. [...] The entity of “man” and his basic condition was considered constant in essence and not itself an object of reshaping techne. [...] The effective range of action was small, the time span of foresight, goal-setting, and accountability was short, control of circumstances limited. (Jonas, H. 1984, pp. 4—5.)

According to Jonas new dimensions of responsibility emerged because nature became a subject of human responsibility. This is underlined by the fact of the irreversibility and cumulative character of man’s impact on the living world. Knowledge, under these circumstances, is a prime duty of man, and must be commensurate with the causal scale of human action. Man should seek “not only the human good but also the good of things extra-human, that is, to extend the recognition of ‘ends in themselves’ beyond the sphere of man and make the human good include the care of them.” (Jonas, H. pp. 7-8.)

For Jonas an imperative that is responding to the new type of human action might run like this. Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life. Or expressed negatively: Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life. (Jonas, H. p. 11.)

Since future human beings and non-human beings do not have rights, our duties to future generations and to nature are independent of any idea of a right or reciprocity. Human responsibility is basically a non-reciprocal duty to guarding beings. (Jonas, H. pp. 38-39.)

Jonas states that the necessary conditions of moral responsibility are as follows. “The first and most general condition of responsibility is causal power, that is, that acting makes an impact on the world; the second, that such acting is under the agen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• title
• copy
• contents
• Editorial
• Preface
• Introduction
• Against Market Fundamentalism: “The Capitalist Threat” Reconsidered
• Ethics of Capitalism
• Misunderstood and Abused Liberalism
• Humanizing the Economy: On the Relationship between the Ethics of Human Rights and Economic Discourse
• The Possibility of Stakeholder Capitalism
• Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ethicality in Business and Management
• Responsibility and Profit Making
• References
• About the Contributors