Abraham Singer, “The Psychological Limits of Cooperation and Competition: or, Everything I Need to Know about Business Ethics I Learned from my Father.”

Abe Singer, University of Toronto

One of the major difficulties involved in understanding the ethical dimensions of business organization and decision-making is that we often think of business and economics as inherently amoral, if not downright immoral. “It’s not personal, it’s business,” is the cliché often used to justify a course of action which might seem ethically dubious from a certain perspective. In this talk I aim to explain the ethical dimensions of business and the marketplace through a poignant, though crude, Jewish New York witticism. This helps us understand the differences between the moral dimensions of the market and the morality which exists within businesses, as well as the possibilities and problems in creating alternative workplace organizations and cultures.