Duty, Boycotts, and the Pricing of Ethics

Richard M. Robinson
Additional contact information
Richard M. Robinson: State University of New York – Fredonia (SUNY Fredonia)

Chapter 12 in Business Ethics: Kant, Virtue, and the Nexus of Duty, 2024, pp 227-246 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The social benefits derived from competitive markets certainly depend upon participants conforming to generally accepted notions of moral duty. These notions include perfect duties such as those against fraud, deception, and coercion, as well as imperfect duties such as those that favor beneficence but with practical limits. These duties are examined here where product markets, capital markets, and internal labor markets are shown to be capable of imposing conformance through both formal and informally organized boycotts. A categorization of classic and recent boycotts into those motivated by (i) sympathy for the suffering of others and (ii) outrage over violations of generally accepted social norms is provided. It is argued that the former motivation seeks to establish new norms, and the latter seeks to enforce existing norms. Through this exploration, a resolution of the so-called Adam Smith problem concerning the morality of the invisible hand is offered.

Keywords: Adam Smith problem; Chambers and Lacey; Ideal Kantian market; Community of juridical duty; Community of full moral duty; Pursuit of a moral community; Market pricing of ethics; Formally organized boycotts; Informal boycotts; Kantian outrage; Smithian sympathy; Brazilian rainforest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sptchp:978-3-031-63122-1_12

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031631221

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-63122-1_12

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Texts in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().