The Natural Link Between Virtue Ethics and Political Virtue: The Morality of the Market

Against the idea that market economy is something greedy and immoral, we will set out the idea that market economy based on firms has a very positive moral content: the possibility of excellence of human action. Firms based on people acting together, sharing the culture of the organization, toward virtue-based ethics, create and distribute most of the economy’s wealth, innovate, trade and raise living standards. We will present a criterion which states that social coordination improves if the process of creation of individual possibilities of action, which is carried out in the social institutions—in our case, the firm—is extended. There is a retention of possibilities that is formed in the institutions and transmitted culturally. In that moment entrepreneurship emerges, the creative tension that expands, maintains, or diminishes the possibilities of action. Hence, the firm is the institution that carries out a very important practice: fostering new possibilities of individual action. In this paper, we will adopt the point of the view of the acting person. The reality we observe is personal action within its cultural and institutional dimensions. A theory of personal action in societal institutions bridges the way from virtue-based ethics toward ethics of institutions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013