Adam Smith’s Bourgeois Virtues in Competition

Whether or not capitalism is compatible with ethics is a long standing dispute. We take up an approach to virtue ethics inspired by Adam Smith and consider how market competition influences the virtues most associated with modern commercial society. Up to a point, competition nurtures and supports such virtues as prudence, temperance, civility, industriousness and honesty. But there are also various mechanisms by which competition can have deleterious effects on the institutions and incentives necessary for sustaining even these most commercially friendly of virtues. It is often supposed that if competitive markets are good, more competition must always be better. However, in the long run competition enhancing policies that neglect the nurturing and support of the bourgeois virtues may undermine the continued flourishing of modern commercial society

Lakatos on justificationism

According to the scientific "justificationist" method, knowledge consisted of proven sentences. Classical intellectuals (or "rationalists," in the narrow sense of the term) have accepted extremely varied - and powerful "proofs", through revelation, intellectual intuition, experience. These, with the help of logic, have allowed them to prove any kind of scientific statement. Classical empiricists accepted as axioms only a relatively small set of "factual propositions" that expressed "hard facts". The value of their truth has been established by experience and has been the empirical basis of science. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28722.2528

The moral layer of contemporary economics: A virtue-ethics perspective

This paper questions whether the contemporary science of economics and its recommendations are built on sound moral foundations as assessed from a virtue-based definition of ethical behaviour. We argue that the model of man underlying economic analyses can correspond to the model of a virtuous person, and that economics, by advocating reasoned choice and careful resource utilization, makes a positive contribution to the moral development of individuals.Economics; Efficiency; Rationality; Tastes; Virtue Ethics

Virtue and argument: Taking character into account

In this paper we consider the prospects for an account of good argument that takes the character of the arguer into consideration. We conclude that although there is much to be gained by identifying the virtues of the good arguer and by considering the ways in which these virtues can be developed in ourselves and in others, virtue argumentation theory does not offer a plausible alternative definition of good argument