Nothing is more common in moral debates than to invoke the names of great thinkers from the past. Business ethics is no exception. Yet insofar as business ethicists have tended to simply mine abstract formulas from the past, they have missed out on the potential intellectual gains in...

Academic departmentalization has limited the dimensionality and thus the richness of analysis in the social sciences. The author examines the case of a modem economics as an example. He reviews the ideas of Williamson (2000), who cites the limits of scope in the New Institutional Economics;...

In the field of business ethics, Adam Smith has generally been viewed with a measure of suspicion. Smith's famous invocation of the invisible hand - according to which self-interest promotes the greater good - has generally been seen as a fundamental challenge to a discipline committed to the...

James M. Buchanan revisited his mentor's famous 1923 essay “The Ethics of Competition” in an essay written for the centenary celebration of Frank Knight's birth in 1985. Buchanan's paper focused on the first section of Knight's essay, and outlined why it provided an inadequate criticism of a...

Frank H. Knight's antagonism to religion is well-known, and features prominently in his writings from the 1930s on. But during the 1920s, when he was a professor at the University of Iowa and wrote some of his most important essays on the limitations of economics, Knight was an active...

According to social contract theories of morality, right and wrong are nothing more than the agreement among rationally self-interested individuals to give up the unhindered pursuit of their own desires for the security of living in peace. I argue that theism provides a better motivation for...

Few people think of business ethics as being addressed outside of main-stream business ethics, philosophy and corporate social responsibility circles. This view is in error. Arguably the most prominent philosopher of the last century, Ayn Rand, has provided a philosophy of business that is...

Market failures, which are usually viewed as a consequence of self-interest, are also supposed to be a major justification for coercive state interventions. This was the view of, among others, Richard Musgrave and Paul Samuelson, but not of James Buchanan. The latter certainly admitted that...

The objective of this article is to analyze the main international legal foundations and foundations that are responsible for protecting the right to inclusive education of people with disabilities. To do this, the theoretical notions concerning people with disabilities, the social model, and...

Der vorliegende Beitrag geht der Frage nach, inwiefern die deutschen „Hartz-Reformen“ sowie die Ende 2010 vorgestellten neuen Regelsätze wirtschaftsethisch legitim sind. Orientierung bietet dabei das Modell der integrativen Wirtschaftsethik von Peter Ulrich. Darauf basierend wird außerdem...