Can the beast be tamed?: Reflections on John McMurtry's unequal freedoms: The global market as an ethical system
Journal of Business Ethics 33 (1) (2001)
| Abstract | My paper responds to certain themes of Professor John McMurtry's recent book, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Although I am in general sympathy with McMurtry's penetrating critique of conventional market theory and practice, I find Unequal Freedoms ambivalent on the critical question of whether endorsing and enacting the life-value code McMurtry proposes would require only a mitigation of the principles and definitive activities of the competitive market system or whether significant reforms within the system would have to be deep structural ones. It is argued that the second alternative is inescapable. I defend my perspective from the point of view of a philosophical analysis of orthodox or neo-classical theory-construction about the competitive market order. In particular, I examine three fundamental principles of such modelling: the maximization of the satisfaction of self-interest, the unboundedness of consumer desire for material goods, and the distribution of monetized wealth. In order for McMurtry's "civil commons" to survive, the practice of each of these principles would need to be radically modified. However, in doing so, competitive capitalism would lose its essential identity as a socio-economic order. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,701 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesLawrence Souder (2010). A Free-Market Model for Media Ethics: Adam Smith's Looking Glass. Journal of Mass Media Ethics 25 (1):53 – 64.
John McMurtry (2002). Why the Protestors Are Againstcorporate Globalization. Journal of Business Ethics 40 (3):201 - 205.
John McMurtry (2003). The Life-Blind Structure of the Neoclassical Paradigm: A Critique of Bernard Hodgson's "Economics as a Moral Science". Journal of Business Ethics 44 (4):377 - 389.
John McMurtry (1997). The Contradictions of Free Market Doctrine: Is There a Solution? Journal of Business Ethics 16 (7):645-662.
John Mcmurtry (1991). Education and the Market Model. Journal of Philosophy of Education 25 (2):209–217.
John McMurtry (2012). Behind Global System Collapse: The Life-Blind Structure of Economic Rationality. Journal of Business Ethics 108 (1):49-60.
Robert Elliott Allinson (2004). Circles Within a Circle: The Condition for the Possibility of Ethical Business Institutions Within a Market System. Journal of Business Ethics 53 (1-2):17-28.
Bernard Hodgson (2005). Thinking and Acting Outside the Neo-Classical Economic Box: Reply to McMurtry. Journal of Business Ethics 56 (3):289 - 303.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads9 ( #114,124 of 549,119 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,361 of 549,119 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
