Ethics and Capitalism

David Robinson is an associate professor of economics and dean of the
Faculty of Social Sciences at Laurentian University.

This very loosely connected collection contains two enjoyable pieces.
Dan Usher presents “a well upside-down.” David Newhouse, writing out
of his experience with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and
years in the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs, makes a dramatic,
contentious, and probably brave claim; in “Resistance Is Futile:
Aboriginal Peoples Meet the Borg of Capitalism,” he concludes that
“existence as we have known it has come to an end. We need now to
create a way of living in the new world.”

Wes Craig, a professor of business ethics at York University, is one of
the bright lights that fails to illuminate. He seems to think that
corruption came with globalization, and that globalization followed the
collapse of communism. He asks why Western firms participate in Third
World corruption, and answers that because economists use rational agent
theory and because some moral philosophers support relativism, managers
can use these views as excuses. After proving that corruption is
unethical, Craig tells us that in order to build an ethical
international business culture, business has to decide to be ethical. It
is hard to get more trivial.

The chapter by Julie Nelson, a well-known feminist economist, is not
about capitalism and ethics at all. It criticizes economics as a source
of distorted assumptions, ascribes the distortion to a crisis about
masculinity in the 19th century, and reiterates the demand that
attributes associated with women be more highly valued. A better editor
would have saved this piece for another book.

I really wanted to like this book. It has a grand topic and well-known
authors. Unfortunately, it also has a lot of weak writing and hackneyed
argument.