The Ethics and Economics of Middle Class Romance

This article shows the philosophical kinship between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on the subject of love. Though the two major 18th century thinkers are not traditionally brought into conversation with each other, Wollstonecraft and Smith share deep moral concerns about the emerging commercial society. As the new middle class continues to grow along with commerce, vanity becomes an ever more common vice among its members. But a vain person is preoccupied with appearance, status, and flattery—things that get in the way of what Smith and Wollstonecraft regard as the deep human connection they variously describe as love, sympathy, and esteem. Commercial society encourages inequality, Smith argues, and Wollstonecraft points out that this inequality is particularly obvious in the relationships between men and women. Men are vain about their wealth, power and status; women about their appearance. Added to this is the fact that most middle class women are both uneducated and encouraged by the conduct literature of their day to be sentimental and irrational. The combined economic and moral considerations of Wollstonecraft and Smith show that there is very little room for love in commercial society as they conceived it.

Ethics and Economics of Medical Supplies in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: The distribution of healthcare resources across local and global communities has triggered alarms throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Injustice and inefficiency in the transfer of lifesaving medical supplies are magnified by the urgency of the public health crisis, ramified through pre-existing socioeconomic tensions, and further aggravated by frictions that plague international cooperation and global governance. Aim: This article explores the ethical and economic dimensions of medical supplies, from the microcosm of distributive algorithms to the macroscope of medical trade. Methods: It first analyses the performance, strategy, and social responsibility of ventilator-suppliers through a series of case studies. Then, the authors seek to redress the need-insensitivity of existing distributive models with a new price-based and need-conscious algorithm. Next, the paper empirically traces the exchange of medical supplies across borders, examines the effect of trade disputes on medical reliance and pandemic preparedness, and makes a game-theoretical case for sharing critical resources with foreign communities. Conclusion: The authors argue that the equitable allocation of medical supplies must consider the contexts and conditions of need; that political barriers to medical transfers undermine a government’s capacity to contain the contagion by reducing channels of access to medical goods; and that self-interested public policies often turn out to be counterproductive geopolitical strategies. In the post-pandemic world, the prospect of medical justice demands a balanced ethical and economic approach that cuts across the borders of nation-states and the bounds of the private sector and the public sphere.

Religious-ethical Framework of Islamic Economics

The article studies relation between ethics and economics to what role moral and economic principles play in Islamic economics. The article includes introduction, two sections and conclusion. The first section discusses a relation between ethical norms and economics. We attempted to critically analyze moral and ethical norms proposed by the western economists such as Jean-Baptiste Say, Leon Walras, Alfred Marshal in XIX century. Muslim social scientist Ibn Khaldun and French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed not to consider an individual only as economic unit but develop his other aspects and potential as part of their economic research. The second section considers how far ethical norms of Islamic economics were researched. The article emphasizes that norms and principles of Islamic economics derive from Quran and Sunnah, researches ethics of those economic principles. To be exact, we will determine that Islamic economics is based on fair trading, economic equality, property protection and scrutinize each that aspect. The research results will prove that moral and ethical norms play a crucial role in general economic science, ethical norms of Islamic economics consist an integral part of economic decisions and actions.

Basic concepts

This chapter clarifies the most fundamental concepts of business ethics. Business ethics problems are characterized as interaction problems emerging from the interdependence of at least two actors. The problem of scarcity and the limits of individual moral action are introduced: business ethics starts where individually virtuous behavior cannot solve the problem of scarcity. The terms ethics and economics are defined. Business ethics is interpreted as an ethics from a broad economic perspective that examines which norms can be established under conditions of global economies. In this context, normative implications of economics are emphasized. Business ethics is then situated within philosophy, and the essential tension between two basic approaches to business ethics, the dualistic and the monistic, is discussed.

The Tyranny of Openness: What Happened to Peer Production?

This paper examines a “culture war” underway among software peer-production communities through relevant blog posts, legal documents, forum discussions, and other sources. Software licensing has been a defining strategy for peer producers, and much of the conflict at hand revolves around whether licensing should more fully incorporate ethics and economics, respectively. Feminist analysis can aid in tracing the contours of discontent through its emphasis on social processes that enable and infuse productive activity—processes that peer producers have trained themselves to ignore. The emerging critiques, and the experiments they have inspired, gesture toward fuller understandings of what “free” and “open” might mean.

Balancing of Values and the Value of Balancing (Part Two)

The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of two epistemological problems that are directly related to the balancing of values in judicial prac­tice – the nature of human rights and the relationship between law and non-le­gal normativity. According to the authors, the dispute between Habermas and Alexy over what is the authority of law in the area of human rights illustrates the conflict between Kantian legal philosophy and jurisprudence of interests, between the absolutism of deontological ethics and consequentialism. Balanc­ing legal values, using, among other things, the economic analysis of law, is one of the ways of the conscious evolution of law, its synchronization with the flow of life of society. Another problem is related to the conflict between the natural boundaries of law as a scientific and practical field of knowledge, and the regu­latory function of law, which presupposes a timely and adequate response of the law to external events and challenges. The authors turn to Luhmann’s dis­tinction between the normative closeness of law and its cognitive openness and come to the conclusion that there is both direct and indirect communication be­tween law and other normative systems (such as ethics and economics). Law assimilates and transforms ideas and values ​​of other areas of knowledge, but it shares with them the same context, which allows us to speak of the common cognitive structures

Review of Social Workers Count: Numbers and Social Issues by Michael Anthony Lewis

Lewis, Michael Anthony. 2017. Social Workers Count: Numbers and Social Issues. 2019. New York: Oxford University Press. 223 pp. ISBN 978-019046713-5 The numeracy movement, although largely birthed within the mathematics community, is an outside-the-box endeavor which has always sought to break down or at least transgress traditional disciplinary boundaries. Michael Anthony Lewis’s book is a testament that this effort is succeeding. Lewis is a social worker and sociologist with an impressive resume, author of Economics for Social Workers, co-editor of The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, and member of the faculty at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Although explicitly targeted to social work students and professionals, the nine chapters here provide a good quantitative literacy education accessible to the general public and include a great many of the topics one would find in a "standard" quantitative literacy text written by a mathematician. The examples, despite being rooted in social work, are interesting and relevant to those outside that discipline, and speak to Lewis’s breadth of knowledge and the skill of being able to make connections between different types of knowledge and evidence that is inherent in being a numerate person.