[ha ha ha]
<http://www.breakingviews.com/2009/04/01/Moralist%20manifesto.aspx?sg=features
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The Moralist Manifesto BY EDWARD HADAS
Moralist manifesto: Finance is not usually associated with questions of good and evil. The last few months have been something of an exception, at least for some politicians. It has become fashionable to blame greedy bankers for the ongoing financial crisis. But that is little more than name-calling. The best way to ward off future crises is through serious analysis of financial morality.
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http://philosophy.wisc.edu/hausman/papers/gauthier.htm
Are Markets Morally Free Zones?
Daniel M. Hausman*
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Markets are central institutions in societies such as ours, and it seems appropriate to ask whether markets treat individuals justly or unjustly and whether choices individuals make concerning their market behavior are just or unjust. After all, markets influence most important features of our lives from the environment in which we live to the ways in which we find pleasure and fulfillment. Within market life we collectively determine the shape of human existence.<1>
Yet in Chapter 4 of Morals by Agreement<2>David Gauthier argues that a perfectly competitive market is "a morally free zone", an arena of social life in which moral evaluation has no role to play. Gauthier is not maintaining that real markets are such morally free zones, but his claim is still remarkable. If it were correct, morality would find applicability to markets only in virtue of the imperfection of those markets. I find this claim difficult to accept and hard to reconcile with comments Gauthier makes about real imperfect markets and with his general views on justice. [snip]