The Market Of Virtue

In the highly praised The Market for Virtue, David Vogel presents a clear, balanced analysis of the contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement in the United States and Europe. In this updated paperback edition, Vogel discusses recent CSR initiatives and responds to new developments in the CSR debate. He asserts that while the movement has achieved success in improving some labor, human rights, and environmental practices in developing countries, there are limits to improving corporate conduct without more extensive and effective government regulation. Put simply, Vogel believes that there is a market for virtue, but it is limited by the substantial costs of socially responsible business behavior. Praise for the cloth edition: "The definitive guide to what corporate social responsibility can and cannot accomplish in a modern capitalist economy."—Robert B. Reich, Brandeis University, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor "Vogel raises a number of excellent points on the present and future of CSR."—Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School "A useful corrective to the view that CSR alone is the full answer to social problems."—Business Ethics "The study combines sound logic with illustrative cases, and advances the sophistication of the CSR debate considerably." —John G. Ruggie, Harvard University, co-architect of UN Global Compact

The Market of Virtue - Morality and Commitment in a Liberal Society is a contribution to the present controversy between liberalism and communitarianism. This controversy is not only confined to academic circles but is becoming of increasing interest to a wider public. It has become popular again today to criticize a liberal market society as being a society in which morality and virtues are increasingly being displaced by egoism and utility maximization. According to this view the competition between individuals and the dissolution of community ties erode the respect for the interests of others and undermine the commitment to the common good. The present book, however, develops quite a different picture of a liberal society. An analysis of its fundamental principles shows that anonymous market-relations and competition are by no means the only traits of a liberal society. Such a society also provides the framework for freedom of cooperation and association. It gives its citizens the right to cooperate with other people in pursuit of their own interests. Just as the rivalry between competitors is a basic element of a liberal society so is the cooperation between partners. Thus not only self-centred individualism is rewarded. The main part of the book explains how the freedom to cooperate and to establish social ties lays the empirical foundation for the emergence of civil virtues and moral integrity. It is the basic insight of this analysis that it can no longer be maintained that a liberal society is incapable of producing moral attitudes and social commitment. If a civil society can develop under a liberal order, then one can reckon with citizens who voluntarily contribute to public goods and who commit themselves of their own accord to the society, its constitution and institutions. However this book not only develops further arguments for the current debate between liberalism and communitarianism by explaining the emergence of morality and virtue in a market society. It also provides new aspects for the present theoretical and methodological controversies over the fundaments of the social sciences and contributes to the advancement of the modern individualistic approach in social theory. In this context it aims especially at an improvement of a sociological model of behaviour.

Interest in Aristotelianism and in virtue ethics has been growing for half a century but as yet the strengths of the study of Aristotelian ethics in politics have not been matched in economics. This ground-breaking text fills that gap. Challenging the premises of neoclassical economic theory, the contributors take issue with neoclassicism’s foundational separation of values from facts, with its treatment of preferences as given, and with its consequent refusal to reason about final ends. The contrary presupposition of this collection is that ethical reasoning about human ends is essential for any sustainable economy, and that reasoning about economic goods should therefore be informed by reasoning about what is humanly and commonly good. Contributions critically engage with aspects of corporate capitalism, managerial power and neoliberal economic policy, and reflect on the recent financial crisis from the point of view of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Containing a new chapter by Alasdair MacIntyre, and deploying his arguments and conceptual scheme throughout, the book critically analyses the theoretical presuppositions and institutional reality of modern capitalism.

Political consumerism is turning the market into a site for politics and ethics. It is consumer choice of producers and products on the basis of attitudes and values of personal and family well-being as well as ethical or political assessment of business and government practice. In the face of economic globalization and a regulatory vacuum, consumers increasingly take responsibility in their own hands, making the market an important venue for political action through their decisions of what to purchase. This book opens the readers' eyes to a new way of viewing everyday consumer choices and the role of the market in our lives, illuminating the broader theoretical and historical context of concerns about sweatshops, responsible coffee, and ethical and free trade. Contemporary forms of political consumerism - boycotts, labelling schemes, stewardship certification, socially responsible investing, etc. - are described and evaluated. Individual actions are shown to be important in the complexity of globalization.

May you sell your vote? May you sell your kidney? May gay men pay surrogates to bear them children? May spouses pay each other to watch the kids, do the dishes, or have sex? Should we allow the rich to genetically engineer gifted, beautiful children? Should we allow betting markets on terrorist attacks and natural disasters? Most people shudder at the thought. To put some goods and services for sale offends human dignity. If everything is commodified, then nothing is sacred. The market corrodes our character. Or so most people say. In Markets without Limits, Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski give markets a fair hearing. The market does not introduce wrongness where there was not any previously. Thus, the authors claim, the question of what rightfully may be bought and sold has a simple answer: if you may do it for free, you may do it for money. Contrary to the conservative consensus, they claim there are no inherent limits to what can be bought and sold, but only restrictions on how we buy and sell.

This sweeping, comparative study of taxation in the United States and Australia shows that even as governments in the Western world have become increasingly sophisticated tax collectors, a competitive and ruthless market in advice on tax avoidance has developed. The same competitive forces in the late twentieth century which have driven down prices and sparked efficiencies in the production of fast food or computer parts have helped stimulate the markets for "bads" like tax shelters and problem gambling. Braithwaite draws the surprising conclusion that effective regulation could actually flip markets in vice to markets of virtue. Essential reading for anyone involved in policy, governance, and regulation, Markets in Vice, Markets in Virtue provides a blueprint for restoring the equity of Western tax systems and a breakthrough theory of how regulators can support markets in virtue and curtail markets in vice.

Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?In his New York Times bestseller Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don't honor and that money can't buy?

With examples from England, the United States, Sweden, Egypt, Hong Kong, and many other countries, Dezalay and Garth explore how international developments in turn transform domestic methods for handling disputes. Finally, they analyze the changing prospects for international business dispute resolution given the growing presence of international market and regulatory institutions such as the EEC, NAFTA, and the World Trade Organization.