Business Ethics

Should Business Ethics Be an Imperial as Well as a Colonized Discipline?

Relating Markets to Other Competitive Institutions

Wayne Nordness Eastman

Rutgers Business School

Some countries, notably South Korea, have a history of moving from being colonized to becoming formidable economic and cultural imperial powers themselves--witness Kia cars, Samsung phones,  K-Pop songs, and Parasite's best picture Oscar several years back--even while remaining much smaller objectively than powerful neighbors--in Korea's case, its former colonizer Japan and the behemoth of China.  This paper is written in the hope that in the coming years the field of normative business ethics will follow a similar trajectory.  We can, it will be suggested, move being a mostly colonized subject of intellectual approaches from outside, such as virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology, agency theory, anti-capitalism, and pro-capitalism, to a South Korea-like mixed status in which we are an important exporter of ideas originating with us, even while we remain tiny relative to large disciplinary neighbors such as philosophy, law, economics, and political science.   The suggested vehicle for our moving from being an intellectual colony to our becoming a successful exporter of ideas is Joseph Heath's market failures approach to business ethics (2014, 2023), modified so that it takes into account regulatory failures as well as market failures and applies to competitive elections, cultural competition, and reputational competition as well as to market competition.  Heath's normative theory, and the positive economic concepts of market success (Smith, 1776; Hayek, 1945) and market failure (Pigou, 1923; Akerlof, 1970) that he relies on, can be usefully applied to other domains of ethics, it will be suggested.  In that process of extension, the self-aggrandizing imperial economics of Gary Becker (1980) becomes something much better--a Heath-indebted ethics of different competitive institutions that is self-critical as well as self-believing and that defines paths for dissenters and moderate competitors as well as for all-in competitors in different domains.