In this 21-minute video lecture, Entrepreneurship and Virtue Ethics, I connect the success traits of entrepreneurs (e.g., initiative, guts, win-win trade, and so on) with moral virtues (e.g., integrity, courage, justice, and so on).
My thesis is that what is practical in business and what is moral are tightly integrated — in contrast to the often-stated separation thesis which holds that business success and moral goodness are categorically distinct.
This video lecture is a follow up to The Entrepreneurial Process — What Makes Entrepreneurs Tick? and is part of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship’s “Entrepreneurship and Values” series of short lectures by entrepreneurs and academics including John Chisholm, Alexei Marcoux, Terry Noel, Robert Salvino (forthcoming), and William Kline (forthcoming).
Related:
My “What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” [pdf], originally published in Journal of Private Enterprise, 24(2), Spring 2009, 49-57. Also online at the Social Science Research Network, at Amazon in Kindle e-book version, in Serbo-Croatian and Spanish translations, and in audio format (MP3 and YouTube).
This really an outstanding video, Stephen. It should not surprise you that I agree with it conceptually. Unfortunately, we have seen time and time again that one can be a very successful business person even in the absence of the proposed virtues. I’d be interested in seeing another part of this video which explains why success in the absence of virtue is still possible and common.
How wonderful it would be if all business people lived according to these virtues. Most do. But the small number of those who don’t do tremendous damage to the system and seem to do just fine for themselves.
Love to know why you think that is.
Steve
Steve: still have to make time for this video in a busy weekend, but to begin to touch on your question, it’s important to make the distinction between businesspeople who make it by vision, boldness and hard work and those who make it by pull, graft and playing a corrupt interventionist system. The former are responsible for the highest standard of living ever achieved by a human society, the latter for undermining it.
The American Federal Register now contains over 80,000 pages of fine print rules, regulations and notices written and passed by unelected bureaucrats behind closed doors unvetted by checks and balances of law. A commentator pointed out that a single regulation in the Register can mean billions for a favored corporation. This is what left pundits call a free or inadequately regulated market. Perhaps 160,000 pages would be enough?
Today, with billions to spend on teams of high priced lawyers and lobbyists corporations have largely bought the regulatory process meant to tame them. Corporate welfare now outstrips social welfare by a factor of almost two to one.
A remark by Ludwig von Mises is relevant:
“The corruption of the regulatory bodies does not shake his blind confidence in the infallibility and perfection of the state; it merely fills him with moral aversion to entrepreneurs and capitalists.”
– Ludwig von Mises, ‘A Critique of Interventionism’
Here’s a picture posted by United States Senator Mike Lee with the words, “Behold my display of the 2013 Federal Register. It contains over 80,000 pages of new rules, regulations, and notices all written and passed by unelected bureaucrats. The small stack of papers on top of the display are the laws passed by elected members of Congress and signed into law by the president.”
If there’s a single image that encapsulates what’s wrong with America today I think this is it.
http://s1302.photobucket.com/user/LeahTh12/media/regulations_zps71259528.png.html