Finance Ethics: The Rationality of Virtue

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Rowman & Littlefield, 1997 - Business & Economics - 183 pages
The first book ever to integrate business ethics with financial economics, Finance Ethics shows how ethical behavior fits within the rational, profit-maximizing, finance paradigm. Dobson argues that even in economic terms the finance paradigm has a serious flaw: it views the firm and financial markets in general as contractual nexuses yet it fails to supply any adequate mechanisms for enforcing those contractual relations. Finance Ethics is therefore not just a moral critique of the finance paradigm, arguing that self-interested profit making must be constrained by ethics. Rather, it is a critique from within that paradigm, in which truth becomes a rational mechanism to enforce contracts, and virtuous behavior is shown to make the most business sense.

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Contents

The Finance Paradox
3
A Contractual Problem
13
Is Reputation Enough?
29
Challenging the Finance Paradigm
43
Toward Reconciling Ethics and Finance
45
Ethics in Financial Practice
63
Some International Implications
75
Beyond the Finance Paradigm
87
Practical Rationality
115
Some Gender Implications
133
Toward a New Finance Paradigm
141
Notes
151
Bibliography
165
Index
179
About the Author
Copyright

Which Rationality?
89

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About the author (1997)

John Dobson is associate professor of finance at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California.

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