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The Contained-Rivalry Requirement and a 'Triple Feature' Program for Business Ethics

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Martin, Dominic [UCL]

This paper proposes a description of the moral obligations of economic agents. It will show that a threefold division should be adopted to distinguish moral obligations applying to their interactions in the market, obligations applying to their interactions inside business firms and obligations applying to their interactions with agents outside the market. Competition might be permissible in the first case since markets are special patterns of social interactions (called adversarial schemes). They produce their benefits when agents try to satisfy exclusive preferences at the expense of others. However, moral obligations inside the firm and moral obligations outside the market are of a different nature. This argument will be developed in the two first parts of this paper. In the third part, it will outline the relevant strengths of that account in relation with two popular views of economic agents' moral obligations: the shareholder primacy view and the stakeholder theory. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Access type Accès restreint
Publication date 2013
Language Anglais
Journal information "Journal of Business Ethics" - Vol. 115, no. 1, p. 167-182 (2013)
Peer reviewed yes
Publisher Springer Netherlands
e-issn 1573-0697
issn 0167-4544
Publication status Publié
Affiliations UCL - SSH/ISP - Institut supérieur de philosophie
Université de Montréal - Département de Philosophie
Links
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Bibliographic reference Martin, Dominic. The Contained-Rivalry Requirement and a 'Triple Feature' Program for Business Ethics. In: Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 115, no. 1, p. 167-182 (2013)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/160558