Can economics be ethical? | Prospect Magazine - 2 views
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Recent debates about the economy have rediscovered the question, “is that right?”, where “right” means more than just profits or efficiency.
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Some argue that because free markets allow for personal choice, they are already ethical. Others have accepted the ethical critique and embraced corporate social responsibility.
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Most radical of all are the ethical systems that reject the market completely. Marxists, some feminists and a few Buddhist approaches to economics take this line: their ethics dispute the starting points of classical market economics—ideas like individual consumer sovereignty, private property and the attractiveness of material wealth. They conclude that to be ethical, an individual should withdraw from the market entirely, or even actively disrupt it.
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