Suchergebnisse

In her 2006 book, The Bourgeois Virtues, economist and philosopher Deirdre McCloskey argued that what fundamentally drives economic development and growth is not so much government intervention or unrestricted libertinism but a set of "bourgeois virtues" that celebrates classical liberalism while powering the innovation that gave rise to modern economies. Drawing on the seven virtues proposed by St. Thomas Aquinas, McCloskey discusses the ways in which each virtue interfaced with the other six and their critical roles in the history of economic development. This article builds on her insights by making two moves. McCloskey, a skeptic of neo-institutional philosophies, does not consider significantly virtue's application to commercial organizations. I argue, however, that these ideas do matter to the organization and operation of businesses and similar institutions. In fact, I suggest that the ideology and ethics of institutions function as part of a dialectical conversation between the institutional "ontology" that forms the moral character of its members and those members, who, in turn, (re)form the institution's ethics. Second, if institutions can embody virtues, how the cardinal virtues—prudentia, temperantia, fortitudo, and iustitia—figure institutionally is not difficult. More challenging is how the theological virtues—love, faith, and hope—which seem to apply to individuals, can apply. Thus, this article argues for how these virtues can be embodied in business organizations, concluding that such a framework allows for a "trinitarian" understanding of the economy as a perichoretic dynamic between the consumer, business organizations, and political/legal structures. In doing so, it criticizes and provides a way out of prevailing political dynamics that often pit individual freedom against institutions.

AbstractThis study constitutes an ethical analysis through the lens of distributive justice in the case of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was enacted in the midst of the Great Recession of 2007–2009. It begins by engaging with the visions of justice constructed by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, using their insights to locate the injustices of TARP according to their moral imaginations. However, this study argues that Rawls' and Nozick's theories of justice primarily envision the nature of law as being restrictive of vice, not as instructors of virtue. Thus, it resources the legal philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to demonstrate how the positive pedagogy of law can enable a more just construction of economic rescue legislation, one that not only prevents future repetitions of economic vices and injustice, but is also formative for a society that prizes economic justice and virtues. In doing so, the study proposes two criteria for a more just consideration of economic rescue legislation that embraces law's positive pedagogy.