Fifteen Eighty Four

Because business ethics sits at the intersection of multiple disciplines, the field often suffers from an abundance of disconnected perspectives. A unified account of the moral purpose of markets and firms is still lacking, making it difficult to navigate the competing moral demands that economic actors encounter in professional life. In our new book, Human Flourishing and the Firm, we argue that this unifying perspective is best supplied by a neo-Aristotelian framework that treats human flourishing, rather than efficiency alone, as the proper end of economic activity.

As the field has expanded, it has generated sophisticated but increasingly specialized debates. Scholars working on market ethics focus on efficiency and market failures; others examine stakeholder mediation or corporate political legitimacy; meanwhile, virtue ethicists consider how firms foster or obstruct character development. These debates do not merely address different topics, but rest on competing assumptions about how moral norms are taken up in practice.

This fragmentation is compounded by a separation from neighboring work in management and economics. While empirical work foregrounds incentives and capabilities, normative arguments often evaluate firms in terms of obligation without engaging with the mechanisms that shape what actors can plausibly do under hierarchy and uncertainty. The result is ethical theory detached from the institutional conditions of agency, and organizational analysis without a usable framework for evaluating the ends that markets and firms ought to serve.

Human Flourishing and the Firm aims to remedy this by developing a virtue-based account of economic agency that is broad enough to address ethical issues surrounding transactions in markets, interactions between organizations members within firms, and relationships between a variety of different stakeholders. Employing immanent critique, we engage with the Market Failure Approach (MFA) and political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) and place them in conversation with perspectives in organization theory, strategy, and finance. Our central claim is that the moral point of firms and markets is not adequately captured by Pareto efficiency. Instead, we propose the standard of eudaimonic efficiency, which is achieved when market exchanges and organizational practices promote economic exchanges that enhance human flourishing without causing unjust harms. On this view, virtues such as justice, honesty, trustworthiness, and practical wisdom are not external constraints on economic life but embody constitutive norms of agency and exchange that are indispensable for navigating the moral complexity of real markets.

The book develops this framework in three steps. First, we show why second-best conditions and pervasive externalities make purely rule-based guidance unreliable, requiring, instead, a range of market virtues that sustain mutually beneficial exchange while discouraging the exploitation of market failures. Second, we argue that firms exist because they allow their members to specialize in the development of valuable goods and/or services while fostering their moral formation, or Bildung. As such, hierarchical authority within the firm is justified when it promotes members’ flourishing by better enabling them to create valued goods and/or services that genuinely benefit other stakeholders. Third, we analyze stakeholder deliberation, including PCSR initiatives and multistakeholder forums, and argue that legitimate agreement requires deliberative virtues that counteract strategic manipulation and power asymmetries. We close by treating workplace injustice as a neglected externality and by outlining managerial obligations to rectify working conditions that undermine flourishing.

Our aim is not to address every contemporary challenge confronting market society, but to make explicit the moral presuppositions of markets and firms and to provide a unified framework for evaluating economic life in terms of flourishing, virtue, and practical wisdom.