The Moral Case for Profit Maximization

The Moral Case for Profit Maximization PDF Author: Robert White
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498542646
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Moral Case for Profit Maximization argues that profit maximization is moral when businessmen seek to maximize profit by creating goods or services that are of objective value. Traditionally, profit maximization has been defended on economic grounds. Profit, economists argue, incentivizes businessmen to produce goods and services. In this view, businessmen do not need to be virtuous as long as they deliver the goods. It challenges the traditional defense of profit maximization, arguing that profit maximization is morally ambitious because it requires businessmen to form normative abstractions and to cultivate a virtuous character. In so doing, the author also challenges the moral basis of corporate social responsibility. Proponents of CSR argue that businessmen can do good while doing well. This book argues that businessmen already do good by maximizing profit, drawing upon the histories of the wheel, the refrigerator, and the shipping container, as well as the biographies of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison to demonstrate the role of values in the creation of material goods and the role of the virtues in value creation. The author challenges readers to rethink the relationship between profit, value, and virtue.

Morality, Competition, and the Firm

Morality, Competition, and the Firm PDF Author: Joseph Heath
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199990492
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
In this collection of provocative essays, Joseph Heath provides a compelling new framework for thinking about the moral obligations that private actors in a market economy have toward each other and to society. In a sharp break with traditional approaches to business ethics, Heath argues that the basic principles of corporate social responsibility are already implicit in the institutional norms that structure both marketplace competition and the modern business corporation. In four new and nine previously published essays, Heath articulates the foundations of a "market failures" approach to business ethics. Rather than bringing moral concerns to bear upon economic activity as a set of foreign or externally imposed constraints, this approach seeks to articulate a robust conception of business ethics derived solely from the basic normative justification for capitalism. The result is a unified theory of business ethics, corporate law, economic regulation, and the welfare state, which offers a reconstruction of the central normative preoccupations in each area that is consistent across all four domains. Beyond the core theory, Heath offers new insights on a wide range of topics in economics and philosophy, from agency theory and risk management to social cooperation and the transaction cost theory of the firm.

The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Economics

The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Economics PDF Author: Mark D. White
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198793995
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 666

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Book Description
This Oxford Handbook explores the various ways ethics can, does, and should inform economic theory and practice. With esteemed contributors from economics and philosophy, it highlights the close relationshop between ethics and economics in the past and lays a foundation for further integration going forward.

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit PDF Author: Frank H. Knight
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486147932
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
DIVThis enduring economics text provided the theoretical basis of the entrepreneurial American economy during the post-industrial era. A revolutionary work, it taught the world how to systematically distinguish between risk and uncertainty. /div

How to be Profitable and Moral

How to be Profitable and Moral PDF Author: Jaana Woiceshyn
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761857001
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
A basic dilemma confronting today’s manager is how to be both profitable and moral. Making profits through immoral means—such as deceiving investors or customers—is unsustainable. Likewise, remaining moral while losing money will cause a business to fail. According to conventional morality, either a business manager maximizes profits and necessarily compromises on ethics, or necessarily sacrifices profits in order to be moral. Woiceshyn explains why this is a false dichotomy and offers rational egoism as an alternative moral code to businesspeople who want to maximize profits ethically. Through logical argument and various examples, this book shows how to apply principles such as rationality, productiveness, honesty, justice, and pride for long-term self-interest.

Generalized Microeconomics

Generalized Microeconomics PDF Author: Jiří Hlaváček
Publisher: Karolinum Press
ISBN: 8024620243
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
The generalization of microeconomics enables model descriptions of economic rationality, even in fields that standard microeconomics more or less avoids, like nonprofit sectors of market economies, altruism, or externalities. Here, the authors broaden the scope of microeconomics while treating standard profit maximization as a special case. They argue, ultimately, that the generalizing criterion is a Darwinian maximization of the probability of survival.

The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions

The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions PDF Author: Seumas Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521767946
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Seumas Miller provides an exciting new philosophical theory of contemporary social institutions and the ethical challenges they confront.

The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior

The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior PDF Author: David C. Rose
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199781745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
It then identifies specific characteristics that moral beliefs must have for the people who possess them to be regarded as trustworthy.

The Political Power of Global Corporations

The Political Power of Global Corporations PDF Author: John Mikler
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745698492
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
We have long been told that corporations rule the world, their interests seemingly taking precedence over states and their citizens. Yet, while states, civil society, and international organizations are well drawn in terms of their institutions, ideologies, and functions, the world's global corporations are often more simply sketched as mechanisms of profit maximization. In this book, John Mikler re-casts global corporations as political actors with complex identities and strategies. Debunking the idea of global corporations as exclusively profit-driven entities, he shows how they seek not only to drive or modify the agendas of states but to govern in their own right. He also explains why we need to re-territorialize global corporations as political actors that reflect and project the political power of the states and regions from which they hail. We know the global corporations' names, we know where they are headquartered, and we know where they invest and operate. Economic processes are increasingly produced by the control they possess, the relationships they have, the leverage they employ, the strategic decisions they make, and the discourses they create to enhance acceptance of their interests. This book represents a call to study how they do so, rather than making assumptions based on theoretical abstractions.

Moral Imagination and Management Decision-making

Moral Imagination and Management Decision-making PDF Author: Patricia Hogue Werhane
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019512569X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Managers are not motivated only by greed, but applying moral principles to decision-making has not been a big success. The author argues that managers and their companies need a moral imagination which lets them be aware of, evaluate, and change the mental models that constrict business behaviour.