Alexei Marcoux — Adventures in the Market for Values

“Adventures in the Market for Values”
Alexei Marcoux, Loyola University Chicago, Quinlan School of Business
October 8, 2013

Abstract:
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.