Some commentators in the business ethics and CSR literatures cheer the emergence of consumers who choose trading partners based upon whether or not those trading partners share one’s ethical/political/religious/social values. I advance a virtue ethics argument against cultivating the disposition to view trade as an opportunity to punish those who don’t share one’s values. I argue that cultivating this disposition is individually imprudent and socially divisive. It is a failure of tolerance – the most important virtue for participants in a liberal social/political/economic order. I argue that the disposition in market participants that Wicksteed calls “nontuism” is tolerance in its commercial form.
WHAT:
Adventures in the market for values
DATE:
October 08 -
October 08, 2013
TIME:
2:00 p.m. -
3:30 p.m.
WHERE:
Ted Rogers School of Management, 55 Dundas St. West, Toronto. Room: TRS 3-119