Business Ethics

Links to my publications in Business and Economic Ethics.

“What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship” [pdf]. In Journal of Private Enterprise, 24(2), Spring 2009, 49-57.
At the Social Science Research Network
Amazon Kindle e-book version.
Serbo-Croatian translation by Alma Causevic. Spanish translation by Walter Jerusalinsky [PDF]. Portuguese translation by Matheus Pacini [PDF] or [html].
Audio edition in MP3 format and at YouTube.

13 arguments for liberal capitalism in 13 minutes [YouTube]. Transcript of the text. The flowchart.

Invited Lecture Series at Francisco Marroquín University, 2011. Videos:
I. Entrepreneurial Ethics.
II. Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy.
III. Socratic seminars on the Best Arguments against Free-Market Capitalism:
1. “Capitalism is dog-eat-dog.”
2. “We live in a world of scarce resources.”
3. “Humans are too depraved for freedom” (at 23 minutes).
4. “Humans are too incompetent for freedom.”
5. “Wealth is a social creation” (at 11 minutes).
6. “Value is not of this world” (at 32 minutes).
IV. Seminar on “Economics as a Value Science.”
V. Public Address: “Entrepreneurs and Philosophers: Why a Philosophy of Freedom Matters.”
VI. Interview: Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Review of Kevin Gibson, Ethics and Business: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2007) [pdf]. In Teaching Philosophy (Spring 2010). Audio version of the review in MP3 or at YouTube.
From my introduction: “Gibson’s approach is middle-of-the-road in the content of his beliefs about business and ethics, so this is a mainstream publication. As such Ethics and Business embodies the strengths of the mainstream—and a few of its weaknesses. So from the perspective of someone outside the mainstream, let me indicate what I take those weaknesses to be in the context of reviewing a textbook written for students. …”

“Ethics and Economics”
In David Henderson, editor, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Liberty Fund, 2008).
CEE is the second edition of The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, which was published to acclaim in 1993, and includes essays by “Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker and George Stigler, former presidential economic advisors, financial columnists, and economists such as Armen Alchian, Don Boudreaux, Deepak Lal, Anna Schwartz, Lawrence Summers, and Murray Rothbard.”

“The Best Work of the Best Minds”: My short article introducing business ethics in Kindle e-publication edition, Audible audio edition narrated by Scott A. Smith, HTML online version, in German translation (PDF] or [HTML], and in Spanish translation at the Fundación Atlas site.

Review of Donald Frey’s America’s Economic Moralists: A History of Rival Ethics and Economics” PDF.
In Business Ethics Quarterly 22.1 (2012), 186-193.
Audio version in MP3 or at YouTube.

“Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics” [pdf]
Originally published in The Journal of Accounting, Ethics & Public Policy 3:1 (Winter 2003), pp. 1-26.
At the Social Science Research Network. Kindle e-book format. Monograph edition from Amazon. Korean translation, Serbo-Croatian translation, and German translation. Portuguese translation.
Abstract: “Most traditional systems of business ethics hold that business is essentially amoral or immoral. Such systems share a common assumption: that conflicts of interest — either because of scarce resources or innate human badness or sin — are basic to the human condition. That assumption of fundamental conflict is rejected in Ayn Rand’s system of ethics. Rand’s system, by contrast, emphasizes the power of human reason to shape one’s character and beliefs, and it makes fundamental reason’s power to develop new resources and cultivate win-win social relationships. In this essay, Stephen Hicks applies Rand’s radical ethical perspective to key issues in business ethics and contrasts it to those perspectives based on the assumption of the amorality or immorality of business.”

Foundations Study Guide: Business Ethics
Spanish translation at the website of Argentina’s Fundación Atlas.

“Defending Shylock: Productive Work in Financial Markets” [pdf]
Abstract: In this essay I discuss the great value that financial markets add to an economy and the nature of the intellectual work that underlays them. In addition, I argue against the usual criticisms of financial markets that those who work in them are zero-sum parasites upon the physical labor and that they make merely “paper profits.” Along the way, I discuss controversial figures such as Martha Stewart, Michael Milken, Aristotle Onassis, Ivan Boesky, Jesus, Augustus, and Shakespeare’s character Shylock from The Merchant of Venice.
At the Social Science Research Network. In pamphlet form at Amazon.

“The Ethics of Outside Funding”. Published in Proceedings of the International Association for Business & Society, 2008.

Interviews for Kaizen with leading entrepreneurs

Collected Posts on the Financial Crisis of 2007-12.

Return to the Publications page. Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.